serial consign

Like every other news junkie, I've spent a good part of the last few days soaking up whatever information I can about the horrible mass murder at Virginia Tech. While exploring the New York Times interactive chronology of the event it occurred to me how representation plays into summarizing homicide. The piece (a detail of which is at the top of this post) utilizes a series of maps and cutaway architectural renderings to outline the tragic events of Monday morning. Much of the coverage of the coverage of this event has outlined how mobile devices and social networking sites were the real means of keeping on top on the story as it developed. However, while citizen journalism raises questions of how we experience a news event as it occurs nothing beats a good old fashioned illustration for summarizing the chaos of a crime scene after the fact.

There is a long-standing tradition of diagramming crime scenes in homicide investigations. On occasion one of these illustrations enters public consciousness. The above drawing is a spatial analysis of the northern half of Dealey Plaza in Dallas Texas at 12:30p.m. on November 22nd 1963. It was delineated by RB Cutler in 1970 and reconstructs the Kennedy assassination through research, photographic evidence, and eyewitness accounts. Note the careful annotation which identifies every individual, ballistic information, and the location of the car carrying JFK is tracked in relation to individual frames of the Zapruder film.

This image is a detail of a drawing by Diller and Scofidio (now Diller Scofidio + Renfro) from the 1992 publication Zone 6: Incorporations. The project, entitled Case #00-17163, catalogues a variety of photographic and forensic evidence in a non-linear fashion over the course of a several page spread. Information is not prioritized or edited and the reader is left to sort out surveillance reports, ballistic evidence, and a photocollage of a crime scene. The open nature of the work, conjures the participatory realm of detective fiction where the viewer is drawn into the work to attempt to determine exactly what has occurred.

Unfortunately projects like #00-17163 find their logic in the interpersonal or political mayhem exemplified by tragedies like the Virginia Tech massacre and the Kennedy assassination. As designers and storytellers we can definitely learn from this field of forensic representation where the storyboard is used in reverse to collapse time, space, and event to reconstruct what has already happened.