Final outcome

Final Outcome


































Its been quite a while since I have wrote and I don't feel I have been the best artist I could of been. I ask myself what does it take to be an artist? Do you have to be qualified or can this be just a hobby or passion. Sometimes I do not know why I have decided to do something, does it have to have an explanation or should it be able to achieve its own autonomy?

I have found this second year difficult so far as I find it hard to ....

Crime and statistics

Anigail Reynolds

MOUNT FEAR Statistics for Violent offences 2001-02 Central Manchester (2003)
130 layers of 10mm polystyrene with sprayed finish. Laminate plinth.
Scale: 1:22,000 (1cm:22m) Relief: 1:24 (1 layer represents 24 offences per km2)
Height 203cm (including plinth)



MOUNT FEAR Statistics for Crimes with Offensive Weapon South London 2001-2002 (2002) corrugated cardboard 2.3m x 1.85m x height 1.85m
Relief 1:3,000 (1m = 3km) and 1: 13.6364 (1 event per km2 per 13.6364) Greatest peak is at 44.8 incidents per km2 per annum



MOUNT FEAR Statistics for Sex Crimes Eindhoven 1998 and 2003 (2004)
Scale: 1:3,300 (1cm:33m) Relief: 1:2 (1 cm represents 2 offences per km2)
A five year comparison of data. The two models (each 2m x 2.5m) are identical in area, crime type and scale. 500 layers of roofing felt weighing 4.5 tonnes.



MOUNT FEAR East London. Police Statistics for violent crimes 2002-3 (2003)
Dimensions 5m40 x 4m25 height 1m45
New Contemporaries 2003, London. Cardboard.






Abigail Raynolds focused her art on some of the crime statistics of Britain. The terrain of Mount Fear is generated by data sets relating to the frequency and position of urban crimes. Precise statistics are provided by the police. Each individual incident adds to the height of the model, forming a mountainous terrain.

All Mount Fear models are built on the same principals. The imaginative fantasy space seemingly proposed by the scupture is subverted by the hard facts and logic of the criteria that shape it. The object does not describe an ideal other-worldly space separated from lived reality, but conversely describes in relentless detail the actuality of life on the city streets.

Her work is factual, using alternative ways to display graphic information.



CRIME AND OFFICIAL STATISTICS


Many theories of crime are based on official statistics provided by the police, courts and other government agencies involved in law enforcements. In countries such as Britain and the USA. These statistics consistently show that some groups are more involved in crime than others. The working class, the young, males, and members of some ethnic minorities are all more likely to commit crime than middle class, the elderly, females and white - according to official data. Some sociologists have taken these figures at face value and have then proceeded to explain why such groups should be criminal. Merton, Cohen and Cloward & Ohlin all assume working-class men are main offenders, although they differ in their explanation as to why this should be so. If it could be shown that the reliability of the figures is open to question, it would raise serious doubts about their theories. In Britain, official statistics on crime are published annually. They provide criminologists, the police, the courts, the media, and anyone else who is interested, with two main types of data:

1.) British crime trends and trends in recorded crime in England & Wales. British crime trends - prove information on the total number of crimes 'known to the police' This information is often taken as an accurate measure of the total amount of crime the data allows comparisons to be made between crimes, and with previous years often the figures receive widespread publicity through the media, particular if they show increases in crime over previous years.

2.) The official statistics provide information on the social Characteristics of those who have been convicted of offences, such as their age and gender.. it is on figures that a number of theories of crime have been based.

Unrecorded crime - not all crimes are recorded by police. There is much evidence of the substantial 'dark figure' of unrecorded crime before a crime is recorded three things must happen:

1 It must come to someones attention that a crime has taken place
2 It must be reported to the relevant agency
3 That agency must be willing to accept that the law has been broken.

Not all crimes are specific victim who is aware that they have done wrong. crimes such as tax evasion, however, do not have single victim to report the offence. In this case the victim is the community as whole, which has been deprived of tax revenue. the extent of this type of crime is difficult to measure, since it can only be uncovered by investigation. however possible to estimate the amount of crime of which victims are aware, but which is not reported to the police or not recorded as crime by them.

Victimisation studies

- Involves asking individuals if them have been victims of crime in the previous year and asked whether the police they reported the crimes and whether police recorded them

Why do people fail to report crime?

They thought the offence was too trivial/or police wouldn't be able to do anything

- It being a private matter or they had dealt with themselves.
- Fear of resprisals
- Fear of dislike of the police
- Or previous bad experience of police or courts.

Not all crimes reported by the police, the police did not always accept than an offence has taken place, don't always fit into crime categories used by British crime surveys while some were recorded as a different type of crime, which is unknown as 'no crime' - this is usually because police see the crime as trivial or thought the innocent dint actually occur, insufficient evidence,victim didn't want to be taken any further

White collar crime

So far it has been suggested that official statistics do no give an accurate picture of the extent of delinquency among middle and middle/working class adolescents. there is evidence that offences commit ed by adults of high social status are less likely to lead to arrests and convictions than those coed adults of low class or status 'Sutherland - (1960)' defines white collar crime as crimes committed by persons of high social status and respectability in the course of their occupations , such crimes include bribery and corruption in business and politics, misconduct by professionals, such as doctors & lawyers, breaking trade regulations in industry, the drug laws, & safety regulations, the misuse of patients & trademarks & misrepresentation in advertising.

Some contemporary sociologists have developed a cultural explanation for crime which uses the concept of underclass rather than that of subcultures Murray (1989): do not accept that the underclass share the same values as other members of society. They see the underclass as responsible for a high proportion of crime and explain their ciminality in terms of their rejection of mainstream values and norms. Murray largely attributes the development of such, values to generosity of welfare states.

From looking at maps in general, I decided to experiment and make my own worlds. Using large Christmas baubles and covering them with small pieces of the world maps, I was able to create my own countries and labels. Going back to what I looked at, in the beginning, 'Oxymoron's', I decided to label my countries with contrasting or conflicting subjects e.g. beautiful ugliness. Although this may seem quite humerus to the viewer or controversial, my aim was to make a realistic, truthful world, which pointed out the negatives and positives. I was interested in how the audience views and sees, how my art can be a visual language which communicates by symbolic use.

Other artists like Marcel Broodthaers use Semiotics.



Various breeds of cattle are presented in a grid-like pattern reassembling pages from an educational or scientific manual. However, the names underneath the cattle are car manufactures. Broodthaers contradicts the visual image, changing and confusing the viewer. Car brands are recognisable to the public, where people can identify one from another, standard, value and status. For example, A 'Mercedes' car is valued more than 'Fiat' car, does this give the particular cattle more status compared to others?

Semiotics
Semiotics, also called semiotic studies or (in the Saussurean tradition) semiology, is the study of signs and sign processes (semiosis), indication, designation, likeness, analogy, metaphor, symbolism, signification, and communication. Semiotics is closely related to the field of linguistics, which, for its part, studies the structure and meaning of language more specifically. Semiotics is often divided into three branches:

Semantics: Relation between signs and the things to which they refer; their denotata, or meaning
Syntactics: Relations among signs in formal structures
Pragmatics: Relation between signs and the effects they have on the people who use them


In the nineteenth century, Charles Sanders Peirce defined what he termed "semiotic" (which he sometimes spelled as "semeiotic") as the "quasi-necessary, or formal doctrine of signs", which abstracts "what must be the characters of all signs used by...an intelligence capable of learning by experience",[8] and which is philosophical logic pursued in terms of signs and sign processes.[9] Charles Morris followed Peirce in using the term "semiotic" and in extending the discipline beyond human communication to animal learning and use of signals.

Ferdinand de Saussure, however, founded his semiotics, which he called semiology, in the social sciences:

It is... possible to conceive of a science which studies the role of signs as part of social life. It would form part of social psychology, and hence of general psychology. We shall call it semiology (from the Greek semeîon, 'sign'). It would investigate the nature of signs and the laws governing them. Since it does not yet exist, one cannot say for certain that it will exist. But it has a right to exist, a place ready for it in advance. Linguistics is only one branch of this general science. The laws which semiology will discover will be laws applicable in linguistics, and linguistics will thus be assigned to a clearly defined place in the field of human knowledge.
—Cited in Chandler's "Semiotics For Beginners", Introduction.

Semioticians classify signs or sign systems in relation to the way they are transmitted (see modality). This process of carrying meaning depends on the use of codes that may be the individual sounds or letters that humans use to form words, the body movements they make to show attitude or emotion, or even something as general as the clothes they wear. To coin a word to refer to a thing (see lexical words), the community must agree on a simple meaning (a denotative meaning) within their language. But that word can transmit that meaning only within the language's grammatical structures and codes (see syntax and semantics). Codes also represent the values of the culture, and are able to add new shades of connotation to every aspect of life.

To explain the relationship between semiotics and communication studies, communication is defined as the process of transferring data from a source to a receiver. Hence, communication theorists construct models based on codes, media, and contexts to explain the biology, psychology, and mechanics involved. Both disciplines also recognize that the technical process cannot be separated from the fact that the receiver must decode the data, i.e., be able to distinguish the data as salient and make meaning out of it. This implies that there is a necessary overlap between semiotics and communication. Indeed, many of the concepts are shared, although in each field the emphasis is different. In Messages and Meanings: An Introduction to Semiotics, Marcel Danesi (1994) suggested that semioticians' priorities were to study signification first and communication second. A more extreme view is offered by Jean-Jacques Nattiez (1987; trans. 1990: 16), who, as a musicologist, considered the theoretical study of communication irrelevant to his application of semiotics.

Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913), the "father" of modern linguistics, proposed a dualistic notion of signs, relating the signifier as the form of the word or phrase uttered, to the signified as the mental concept. It is important to note that, according to Saussure, the sign is completely arbitrary, i.e. there was no necessary connection between the sign and its meaning. This sets him apart from previous philosophers such as Plato or the Scholastics, who thought that there must be some connection between a signifier and the object it signifies. In his Course in General Linguistics, Saussure himself credits the American linguist William Dwight Whitney (1827–1894) with insisting on the arbitrary nature of the sign. Saussure's insistence on the arbitrariness of the sign has also influenced later philosophers and theorists such as Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, and Jean Baudrillard. Ferdinand de Saussure coined the term semiologie while teaching his landmark "Course on General Linguistics" at the University of Geneva from 1906–11. Saussure posited that no word is inherently meaningful. Rather a word is only a "signifier," i.e. the representation of something, and it must be combined in the brain with the "signified," or the thing itself, in order to form a meaning-imbued "sign." Saussure believed that dismantling signs was a real science, for in doing so we come to an empirical understanding of how humans synthesize physical stimuli into words and other abstract concepts.

Mapping

Mapping

(Location) Artists that use maps

Jamie shovlin
November 2010.

Jamie Shovlin (born 1978) is a British conceptual artist.

He staged his first exhibition in 2004 basing it on what he claimed were the drawings of a disappeared schoolgirl called Naomi V. Jelish. He supported this claim with newspaper cuttings and diaries, and the work was bought for £25,000 by Charles Saatchi. Saatchi only realised the work was a hoax half way through the exhibition when he noticed that the girl's name, and that of her teacher John Ivesmail, were both anagrams of Jamie Shovlin.

In 2006 Shovlin created another exhibition based on the memorabilia of a non-existent German glam rock band called Lustfaust. This hoax was again supported with a network of websites Shovlin had created and prompted the cultural critic Waldemar Januszczak to tell his readers how the band had "cocked a notorious snook at the music industry in the late 1970s by giving away their music on blank cassettes and getting their fans to design their own covers." The collection (once exposed) was runner-up for the Beck's Futures prize. In September 2007 Lustfaust, together with Schneider T.M., gave a concert to help celebrate the opening of the new Berlin exhibition space for Haunch of Venison.

Shovlin claims that the main function of his hoaxes was not simply to fool the audience, but rather to let them gradually realise that they were being tricked, and encourage them to question their preconceptions. To this end he included clues in the exhibitions, such as notes describing Lustfaust as steering "dangerously close to Spinal Tap-isms".

A 2006 project by Shovlin was an archive of letters and writings titled Mike Harte - Make Art. This piece consisted of an ongoing mail correspondence during 2001 from the Mike Harte, a long time friend and collaborator of Shovlin (This project is another possible hoax, as Mike Harte's existence is questionable).

Shovlin's work can be found in the following collections, Charles Saatchi (Naomi V Jelish Project), Elspeth & Imogen Turner Collection (Lustfaust Memorabilia Collection, The Black Room Installation, The Ties That Bind Installation, Fontana Modern Masters and others), David Roberts (Fontana Modern Masters). Shovlin is represented by Haunch Of Venison (London, Berlin, Zurich, New York), Unosunove Gallery (Rome) and Cosmic Galerie (Paris).


























1Susan Stockwell

Susan Stockwell is a London based artist. She exhibits in galleries and museums both nationally and internationally. Her work takes forms of drawings, collage, sculpture and installations. It is primarily concerned with transformation. The materials used are everyday, domestic and industrial disposable products that pervade our everyday lives. These materials are manipulated and transformed into art objects. Vividly symbolic 'map' of Britain, South America and Africa are literally 'stitched up' commodities, constructed from tea bags, coffee filter papers and rubber tyre inner tubes. They question the historic and present Day trading of luxury commodities, and address the post and neo-colonial implications of global commerce. The most often material used is paper; maps , dress-making patterns, tea bags, coffee filters,waxed paper portion cups and toilet tissue are also used with her work. These objects are used as ready-made signifiers. The processes of working with materials- accumulating common stacking, sewing and quilting - manipulate and transform. Sometimes minimally effecting the material in sensitive and subtle ways or highlighting characteristics such as papers and fragile qualities.
































Francesca Berrini


Part designer, part surrealist cartographer and creates geographies from maps that have been cut part and re-arranged. Exploring strange combinations of found materials. Berrini was trained not as a painter or crafts woman, but in furniture design programme and the rhode island school of design. She has worked for many years as a professional metal fabricator and finisher. The imagined world giving the map a wholly unexplored cartographic twist to savor. Each piece of work is compiled of hundreds of edged squares cut from atlases, squares are never more of a couple of centimeters, layed out into new and convincing patterns and then sealed over-giving her the freedom to make her own worlds. She believes the maps reveal that 'since the start of my exploration into map making...'
















My work