Abigail Reynolds: Mount Fear

Paul wrote a great post over on Dataisnature about non-digital artists working with visualizations. Particularly striking is Mark Lombardi's beautiful maps of political webs of influence in pen and paper, predating Josh On’s classic They Rule. More images can be found here, the image quality is low but one can just make out the artist’s deliberate use of beauty in making these maps of otherwise grim data.

Another example is London-based artist Abigail Reynolds. Her Mount Fear maps crime statistics in a series of models, translating geographically specific crime data into physical spaces:

Reynolds has executed the project in several locations, using local data to create the models, which are made from layers of cardboard and styrofoam. Painstakingingly, layers are built up to create a to-scale topological model of a geographical region, with the height dimension indicating number of crimes in that area.

The images above show the following:

• Crimes with Offensive Weapon South London 2001-2002
• Sex Crimes Eindhoven 1998 and 2003
• Violent crime 2002-03 East London

The models appear as impenetrable, imposing spaces, giving a physical representation of the crime statistics. As with Lombardi (or indeed with any visualization), aesthetic choices have been made as to how the data is represented. The number of crimes given per layer can be scaled down or up to create a less or more imposing model. But giving a clear physical presence to the data gives the viewer a completely different experience.

(Thanks to Christine Wolfe of Unwetter for the link.)