Datum bellica

what is it

Nearly two decades of recorded conflict in Algeria, week by week, through the civil war and its long aftermath. A creature grown from organised violence, where the kind of violence itself decides which way it grows.

how is it made

The dominant form of violence that week steers the growth: battles push up, riots to the side, attacks on civilians the other way, remote violence on its own diagonal. The number of events drives step length, the death toll drives thickness, lethality sets the colour from bloodless to deep red. The deadliest weeks are the shocks.

what to look for

• Violence as a compass. the first specimen whose direction is a category, not a number. As the conflict shifts from massacres to battles to street riots, the creature visibly changes the way it turns.
• From war to unrest. the early years grow dense and deadly; the later years thin out into the pale, frequent kinks of riots without deaths.

the honest part

One of the strongest on its own terms. Four separate measured fields, and a direction that is genuinely categorical rather than read off the calendar. The one real judgement call is fixing each violence type to a set angle, which imposes an order on categories that don't naturally have one.