Forensic Architecture: Using technology to expose state and corporate violence
This is the first instalment of Tech Pulse, a monthly series by The Monitor Magazine that spotlights individuals and organisations harnessing innovative technologies as a force for good.
We can think of no better way to kick off Tech Pulse than with the interdisciplinary research agency Forensic Architecture (FA), whose visionary practice encompasses architecture, human rights law, technology, investigative journalism, and art and aesthetics.
Founded in 2010 by architect Eyal Weizman and based at Goldsmiths College’s Department of Visual Cultures, the group uses architectural techniques and cutting-edge technologies to investigate cases of state and corporate violence and human rights violations.
They build three-dimensional digital architectural models and maps of the spaces where the events occurred, and then present this evidence in various public spaces, including international forums, museums, and the courts.
FA’s human-rights focused architectural praxis is not new. In 2002 Weizman, then a young architect in Tel Aviv, co-designed a controversial exhibition for Israel’s entry for the 2002 World Congress of Architecture, entitled “A Civilian Occupation: the Politics of Israeli Architecture”. It demonstrated how architecture in Israel has been used as a powerful tool of an illegal military occupation, positing that “architecture can no longer be considered a politically naive activity”. The exhibition was cancelled, its catalogues confiscated.
Over twenty years later, the team he leads at Forensic Architecture are continuing his work supporting the Palestinian people. Since 7th October they have been recording and analysing reports of Israeli military attacks on hospitals in Gaza, and uploading their findings across three continually updated web platforms, which can be viewed here.
FA is the technological calibration of Weizman’s rebellious practice; using architecture as a tool to shed light on state and corporate violence. Through the integration of technology, both everyday and experimental, FA are able to create work that is even more impactful, provocative, and easily accessible to a global audience.
Their portfolio includes a dizzying array of original methods and technologies; in 2022, the Peabody Awards programme credited Forensic Architecture with co-creating “an entire new academic field and emergent media practice”.
Taken from Forensic Architecture’s website.
Their practice operates on the notion that a space bears witness to the events that occur within it — that, as Weizman puts it, “every contact leaves a trace’ and ‘architecture becomes the medium that conserves those traces”. This extends beyond traditional architecture, encompassing diverse environments like forests, deserts, oceans, and virtual spaces.
Take their inquiries into ‘pushbacks’ of asylum seekers, for example; gathering information from geolocation, data mining, fieldwork and open-source intelligence (OSINT), they have been able to accurately locate and timestamp scenes of illegal, violent pushbacks of asylum seekers by unidentified masked men on the Evros/Meriç river, at the ‘border’ between Greece and Turkey. FA seeks to prove the existence of these events where witnesses have had their “phones, documents, and possessions confiscated and often thrown into the river”. Greek and EU authorities strongly deny the allegations and refuse to investigate.
Such technologies have also allowed FA to create a continually evolving interactive cartographic platform of the Aegean sea that maps over 2,000 instances of illegal “drift-backs” (the process of abandoning asylum seekers at sea).
Theirs is a forensics for the digital age which succeeds where conventional forensics falters; one that harnesses various technologies — from satellite data, surveillance footage, citizen video, audio, and mobile phone meta-data — to collate and uncover the ‘traces’ of hidden crimes and violations.
Their investigations — which have been admitted in legal processes in jurisdictions around the world, including in the US, the UK, Germany, Greece, Israel, and Colombia — speak truth to power by wresting the means of justice from corporations and the state and returning it to the communities who need it most. Ultimately, FA has identified how technology can reimagine the architecture of the justice system.
A striking example is the freely-available resource they created to raise awareness of the Grenfell Tower tragedy. They collated citizen footage of the fire taken on mobile phones and, with the “projection mapping” method, recreated the events of that night in a 3D video. Members of the public can personally submit their footage to this open-ended project, which aims to clarify the events of, and leading up to, that night, and hold those responsible to account. It is a powerful case study in how we might take advantage of everyday technologies and their pervasive presence in modern life, for ethical ends — to provide justice for citizens failed by the state.
Amongst the many innovative methodologies FA have developed is that of “situated testimony”:
Taken from Forensic Architecture’s website.
The team have found the use of 3D models to be a highly productive memory aid as they attempt to reconstruct a witness or survivor’s traumatic experience, in order to disseminate the evidence of the crimes committed against them.
In 2023, they were commissioned by Palestinian legal centre Adalah in their historic legal initiative to officially recognise and demarcate the locations of obscured mass graves in Tantura - a Palestinian fishing village that was occupied and destroyed by Israeli forces in May 1948. In pursuit of this, FA painstakingly reconstructed a 3D model of Tantura, a “place long since wiped from contemporary landscape”, using a combination of archival footage, satellite images, “memory sketches” — and a situated testimony with survivor Adnan Yahya.
Yahya was asked about his experience of the battle and occupation, using the 3D reconstruction as a visual memory aid, with a FA researcher adding to the model throughout the interview according to his information. FA have compiled a comprehensive report of their findings, along with a documentary video which “foregrounds the voices of survivors” and includes clips of Yahya’s situated testimony, which is available to view here.
The results of this investigation established the likely location of more than one mass grave at the site, and form part of Adalah’s ongoing campaign for “the official recognition and demarcation of Palestinian mass graves”. As the report states, this project powerfully “demonstrates the ways in which the memory of the land supports the memory of its inhabitants” — those irrepressible ‘traces’ to which Weizman refers.
With situated testimony, FA has pioneered an experimental methodology that brings together software and human memory in order to reconstruct reality. Technology solidifies the slipperiness and ephemerality of memory, so that an individual’s remembered experience becomes manifest on the screen in 3D. In this empowering materialisation, disenfranchised people’s traumatic experiences become tangible judicial tools that can be used to shed light on hidden atrocities, in the pursuit of justice, reparations, and accountability.
Forensic Architecture is, as Professor Yve-Alain Bois put it, “fast becoming the most efficient visual machine against the suppression of evidence by the authors of crimes against humanity” — an initiative that feels more necessary by the day.
