Critical Making Fellowship 2026-2027
Jessica writes:
Within the United States, the racialization and criminalization of Black and Brown bodies have been and continue to be a violent process. One shape and form of this violence is police violence, more specifically, police shootings. Different articles, books, scholars, and organizational databases have gone about examining and tracking police killings, including but not limited to: Washington Post’s Fatal Force Database and Mapping Police Violence.
This year-long fellowship and project is a data visualization project using data from the Washington Post’s database, with a focus on the Latiné people killed in police shootings.
The Visualization Itself
The current idea: there will be a cutout of the United States, and using a pin model, four years of Latiné deaths across the states will be physically represented. Breaking the data into grouped years, the model will drop each year’s number of victims, year by year, with different points of information represented by the pins’ form, color, height, and grouped quantity by diameter.
Focus of Anticipation:
The pins will drop by year and hang suspended. Imagine a map base with pins standing on top, but the base will be embedded with gaps/holes that the pins will fall through when released and stay suspended, so they don’t fall completely to the ground but hang on the mirrored side of where they once lived.
Take, for example, the year 2015, which has 176 recorded victims of police killings; the distribution of the 176 persons will simultaneously fall while the victims of the remaining three years remain standing until the year has passed. The pins dropping down at different intervals represent the ways Latiné death is anticipated and almost inevitable. Latiné bodies within the United States anticipate the potentiality of violence, the knowledge that racialized bodies are not and have not been safe within the nation-state.
Along with this lived sense of precarity and anticipation, the hope is that the viewer who sees this visualization and its process will notice and feel the growing sense of anticipation, though it will differ from the embodied one the community itself feels.
A question here: why not just let the pins drop, and why keep them suspended? Beyond the practicality and efficiency of restarting the board to all four years standing, I am working and inspired by Latiné writing and artistic production of death. It may sound odd, but the idea of the suspension comes from a mixture of Mexican and Chicanx celebration of the Day of the Dead and a poem by Jose Olivarez.
The idea is that underneath the main structure and base of this nation, the lives of the dead remain. The nation-state stands on top of these deaths and is built on this history.
Design and Prototyping
What have we tested and thought through so far? With any prototype, the minute you think you narrow down one detail, a thousand more questions arise. Theoretically, to aid in the visualization of different data elements we have discussed what about the pins can be transformed to make different points.
For example, the height of the pin will represent the different age groups largely affected by police killings; the diameter, the quantity. Where one year has 176 victims, imagining filling even one map with 176 pins felt nearly impossible, not even to consider a four-year range. To consider that the diameter of the pin will represent quantity groups.
1 victim – pin of 4 diameters
5 victims – pin of 7 diameters
15 victims – pin of 10 diameters
Along with height and diameter, the pins will have two different color groups for sex: male and female.
Questions We’ve Encountered
As we began designing and isolating the data, each detail of the prototype raised new questions. With any data visualization projects there are certain audience takeaways you try to achieve. With maps, the process raises more and more questions about geographic exactitude versus approximation. Along with that, you ask the prototype which parts of the data you can visualize at the same time versus what gets lost or is prioritized differently along the way.
Ammon starts here:
A Pedagogical Approach
We started thinking about this project by beginning with the end in mind. I have found that bigger projects like this benefit from taking this approach first, as it narrows down the plethora of alternate paths that are available at the start of a project.
We started by thinking about the project being all done. It’s created, installed, and ready for people to interact with it. Now imagine someone has just finished interacting with the piece. The answer to the following two questions guide our design and development of the project as we go forward. What emotion do you want this person to have? What knowledge should they walk away with?
The answer to the first question was: Anticipation. They should feel a bit of anxiety and trepidation as they anticipate which pins will fall next, and how many will fall. Who’s next?
The answer to the second question was: The concentration of deaths occurs in the border states.
With those two questions answered we could delve into how best to represent the anticipation and the knowledge. We came up with a few different alternatives but always came back to the idea of pins dropping through the map. As Jess explained above, the suddenness of some of the pins dropping away leads to anticipation for the next set of pins to drop. Where? How many? Who?
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