On January 9, 2013 my childhood friend Stephen Harkness and two other men murdered and dismembered Daniel Delfin in Verona, Kentucky. This murder affected me personally and brought many questions to mind about how murder can affect both the family of the victim and the perpetrator. In this project I utilize a database of 256 unique images and randomization software to create a triptych of images. This database consists of childhood images, court documents and photographs, mug shots, evidence pictures, current photos of the killers, maps, screenshots of messages and statuses from the Facebook’s of the killers, conceptual photographs of the murder weapons, and childhood pictures of one of the killers and I. By giving control over to the software to create this triptych of pairings, I aim to create new perceptions of both the victim and the killer that may have not otherwise been evident if the pairings had been purposefully placed. Many times people only see murder cases from one point of view: that the victim is the victim and the murderer is the murderer, but by placing more information into context with the evidence of the court case, I aim to form new opinions from these random pairings of information from the database.
Database Inquiry, Randomized Video, 5:42, 2013