Germany is a crime fiction country. If wanted, fictional murder and manslaughter can be witnessed many times a day throughout the main television networks. There are more than 238 crime series available on Germany’s six largest broadcasting channels.

This overrepresentation marks the starting point of our discussion on possible effects of crime fiction on our perception and behavior. Through different visual levels, we explore the extent to which supposed knowledge about police work, which locations potentially harbor danger, and which characteristics allow victims or perpetrators to be recognized, is reinforced through fictional representations in crime series.

The interaction between fiction and reality is furthermore examined on the basis of our own visual production and the promise of reality in photographic images.

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On the film sets of German crime series, we create an overstaging of the staged scenes trough photographic images, which abstracts what is shown and lends it a theatricality. Contrasted with supposedly authentic images of the corpses and crime scenes, which were made by the film productions themselves, we question the promises of authenticity of the photographic medium.

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In a two-channel video installation various actors recite basic personal information about the roles they have played in crime series. While doing so, they slowly and almost imperceptibly change their appearance. As, among other things, for the creation of phantom images in real police work, various change processes are applied to the actors by means of artificial intelligence to create new possible versions of them. In the process, the real person who has taken on the role of perpetrator or victim in the crime series can no longer be clearly determined and thus no stereotypical classification is possible.

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Another part of the work is a three-channel video installation in which three different tracking shots lead the viewer through a location that has served as a movie set for a fictional crime scene.

The location was documented by photogrammetric methods as a three-dimensional reconstruction, as it is also common in today's police work. In each of the journeys, the space is virtually staged in different ways. In this way, the perception of the place changes and the construction of "fear spaces" via crime series is examined.

* GER, 2021-2022