You can kill anyone you like, you can murder whoever you feel you wish to, but would you?

In a Recent tutorial with my tutor Bob. I have decided that with serial killers it is more often the build up and excitment that gets them off as most often or not many claim they dont remember the actual act of killing, they remember the stalking of the victim, the preperation of the killing. Some are so methodical and so organised they prepare months even years in advance. They are often intelligent and quite sociable. They type that their friends and neighbours describe something along the lines of "wouldnt hurt a fly". A fact many people cant seem to accept or escape is the pure fact that anyone can be a killer, your brother, your mother, your lover, your nieghbour, your doctor, your dentist, your workmate, your bartender, anyone of them has the capacity to be a killer, even you, reading this, you yourself have the audacity and the coldness to be a murderer. You have the abilty to take a life. Any life.
The alure and the fame glittered around killing is too much for some, some kill to simple be noticed, to be in the lime light, some kill to be seen. The notion of everyone having their "15 minutes of fame". Some will do all they can for even one minute.
Many I beleive would actually plan out a murder, organise a killing to the point they have a target, a weapon pikced out, a specfic attire to wear and time frame to go thruogh with the act. This apparent affulation is where the excitement and allure of a killer is?

There may be 50 ways to leave your lover, but there are only 4 ways out of this airplane

At this point in my journey of making art based on Zabriskie point i became downtrodden in the vastness of my ideas and directions i could take, not so much a fork in the road but a whole cutlery draw to pick from. With this apparent status of being "stuck", took the oppurtunity to talk to my tutor and going thorugh my thoughts, ideas and options. From this discussion i was able to pin down the idea of a sort of... self help book, Example the "For Dummies" series. Only mine would have a title a bit like, "How To Be A Serial Killer". Which admittley got me a few funny looks of some peers. The style i would do the work would be of like the inflight safety cards where the people in them are very blank faced, basic colours, simple lines. Though instead of showing how to be safe during flight mine would be giving you a step by step on how to kill people in various ways.

Below the airline illustraion is my intrepretation on how i could manipulate and alter the design to my own needs and requirement, the style and look of it is very deadpan black comedy.
Much like a part of the Movie FIGHT CLUB where they subsititute the regular airline safety cards with a more accurate and realistic design, below is the prop used for the scene in the film.

Detachment = Attachment

In looking at the Zodiac killer i became very interested in his handwritten letters to the press. He was detached enough from society and maybe reality that he murdered others and bragged about it even saying in one letter the people he kills will serve him in the afterlife, whether this is his true belief or not we do not know. Was he desperate to be attached to society/someone he went to the extreme to get attention and respect? The letters were extensively scrutinized by handwriting specialists and compared against a wide variety of suspects to determine the identity of the killer. It is said the killer used his left hand to write the letters, which isn't the hand he usually uses, hence the shaky scribble of the letters. From this i decided to explore this writing, getting others to write using their opposite hand from the usual practice, i did this myself quite a bit and i found it quite therapeutic and even with the less developed hand it is readable. In asking others to use their opposite hand to write with i found they took their time and tried their hardest to make it egilable. They seemingly use their language as a representation of theirselves. The writing style i used however with my otherhand was ot jsut let go and let it flow, it often became very scratch like and had a creepy otherworldy feel to it. It's style enough to distance the writer from the reader, the reader feeling apprehnsion and caution.

Zodiac

A key serial killer i decided to look at was the Zodiac Killer of the 1960's, the same period set for the Movie Zabriskie Point and also in California like the movie. He Officially claimed 5 victims in total, though takes responsibility for many more. A key thing about the killer is that he has never been identified and the case is still open today. He is infamous for his letters he sent to the press about his killings, motives & victims. With these taunting letters he also included various ciphers some of which are still to be solved.



He killed most of his victims via shooting though some were stabbed to death. He himself appointed his name "ZODIAC". His victims were most often young couples. This is an artist representation (Robert Graysmith) of one of the victims boyfriends who survived a encounter with the killer.

Initial Themes/Concepts

Themes i derived from the viewing of the film were of; Human development, human detachment, responsibility and sacrifice. my strongest theme being that of human detachment. In the film i find that there is a few key moments and feelings of great detachment from others. One obviously being that of the riots and of Daria's attitude to aspects of her life after meeting Mark. Mark himself is very detached from others in general, he doesn't really console and trust in others too much. His language towards Daria is very distant. Mark express' apparent disappointment in the fact he didn't murder the officer the police believe he shot. Showing his lack of respect towards life and how he is willing to take another's life to make a stand and a statement.

Ideas i developed from this theme was to perhaps to take photo's of people in transit, more so public transport commuters and their blatant detachment from every person around them. No one else cares where you going why your there or who you are. they see it as a in between and are just keeping to themselves in order to get to where they need to be. So i thought photographs of these people who are crammed into cramped seats on public transport and even sit across from one another have no attachment to the person they are sat with or near. If they are sat next to someone they will do so in a way so they don't actually touch the other person, not even risking a attachment of touch. I do a Public commute to get to uni everyday which consists of getting a bus then a train in order to make it so my studio and the evidence is huge that people don't want to be attached to people they are in such close proximity to and obvious links to via the use of public transport. From this idea i progressed onto the notion of taking pictures of the people we are so detached from we almost take for granted. The mailman/woman, milkman/woman, shop assistants, garbage men. Today these detachments are very clear as with the bin-men and royal mail on strike we find our lives/world a bit harder and more frustrating. Unfortunately I didn't get chance to take these photographs and explore them but i do wish to refer back to my initial ideas in a project of their own perhaps.

My ideas were coming too fast and too varied so i honied it down with some help from my tutor to the detachment of people in the extreme's, these extreme's being that of the detachment of criminals. How far from society's norms and etiquette these people can become. Most often or not they are out to prove something or to make a stand against something but there is those certain individuals that even our vast knowledge of the world cannot fathom. In the most extreme of the criminal i chose to look at the Serial Killer. There are those Serial killers who cannot be explained or their actions remotely rationalized. Despite the huge detachment of these certain individuals from public and society's we do our best to try and "understand". We have established a "criminology" the masses attempt to make what they cannot comprehend. We make small individual societies for them "prisons" in our attempt to "rehabilitate" them as we believe they are "wrong".

Beginnings

My project started off with the viewing of a film, the film being Antonioni's Zabriskie Point. From this broad starting point I was required to create a body of work which related/reflected upon concepts taken from the film. The film itself wasnt recevied well by critics and the public, pretty much "bombing" at the box office. You yourself may have not heard of the film though there may be one scene you could be familiar with which is this one;