Echoes of Eyeball Series: Forensic Architectures

grarpamp grarpamp at gmail.com
Thu Dec 28 12:16:43 PST 2017


http://www.forensic-architecture.org/

Project

Forensic Architecture (FA) is a research agency, based at Goldsmiths,
University of London, that undertakes advanced architectural and media
research on behalf of international prosecutors, human rights
organisations and political and environmental justice groups.

Forensic Architecture is also an emergent field we have developed at
Goldsmiths. It refers to the production and presentation of
architectural evidence – buildings and larger environments and their
media representations.

Background

As contemporary conflicts increasingly take place within urban areas,
homes and neighbourhoods have become targets, and most civilian
casualties occur within cities and buildings. Urban battlefields have
become dense data and media environments, generating information that
is shared on social and mainstream media. Many violations, undertaken
within cities and buildings, are now caught on camera and are made
available almost instantly.

The premise of FA is that analysing IHL and HR violations must involve
modelling dynamic events as they unfold in space and time, and
creating navigable 3D models of environments undergoing conflict, as
well as the creation of filmic animations, and interactive
cartographies on the urban or architectural scale.

Aim

These techniques allow us to present information in a convincing,
precise, and accessible manner crucial for the pursuit of
accountability. Architectural analysis is also important since it
enables new insights into the context and conduct of urban conflicts.
FA has a track record in providing unique and decisive evidence in
high profile human rights investigation about incidents that other
methods cannot engage with.

We often undertake collaborative investigations with partners. These
can include human rights organisations such as Amnesty International
and Human Rights Watch, Centro para la Acción Legal en Derechos
Humanos, B’tselem, Al Mezan and Migeurop. We have also worked with
international prosecutors and offices such as the UN Special
Rapporteur for Counter Terrorism and Human Rights, as well as
reporters from the Bureau of Investigative Journalism.

We share our work with the public via leading research and cultural
institutes. Our main beneficiaries are always the victims of human
rights violations and communities in conflict zones.

Context

The widespread possession of cheap digital recording equipment, the
development of satellite communication, the public availability of
remote sensing technology and the ability to disseminate information
instantaneously through the internet have made urban conflict more
complex, but also generate enormous amounts of data that can be used
as potential resources for monitoring.

Available in real-time, these sources challenge the evidentiary
practices of Human Rights Law and IHL, which has traditionally been
grounded in witness interviews conducted well after the fact. But
these transformations also lead to secondary conflict, about veracity
of online content and the disputed interpretations of news and social
media websites. The establishment of new forums of international
jurisdiction such as the International Criminal Court mean
contemporary forums have themselves become dense media environments,
where screen-to-screen interaction replaces face-to-face deliberation.

The combined urbanisation and mediatisation of conflict makes FA’s
pioneering work an urgent and indispensable new practice for human
rights investigations. FA seeks to respond to these challenges by
developing new modes of media research and new ways of presenting
investigations of urban and architectural environments.

Public Work

In recent years FA has successfully tested its methodologies in a
number of landmark legal and human rights cases undertaken together
with and on behalf of threatened communities, NGOs, prosecutors and
the UN. [see all Investigations] Our work has also generated a robust
debate in human rights, architecture and legal circles.

The UN Special Rapporteur for Counter Terrorism and Human Rights
commissioned FA to analyse the destruction of buildings targeted by
drone strikes [see Drone Strikes] as well as patterns of destruction
in towns and villages resulting from drone warfare in Pakistan,
Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia, and Gaza. This work was undertaken with
the Bureau for Investigative Journalism [see BIJ Drone Strikes in
Pakistan].

We developed unique “data pattern” cartographies for Waziristan and
Gaza [see Gaza Platform], and undertook a number of presentations in
high courts in Israel, Italy, and France.

In 2014-2015 FA collaborated with Amnesty international on reports on
the 2014 Gaza conflict [see Rafah, Black Friday].

In 2012, FA was invited to produce architectural evidence for the
genocide trial of former Guatemalan military dictators Luca García
(July 1978 – March 1982) and Ríos Montt (March 1982 – August 1983) in
the National Court of Guatemala, and in the Inter-American Court for
Human Rights.

FA provided digital architectural models and animations to support a
petition brought by the Palestinian village of Battir against the
security barrier (wall) in the Israeli High Court, helping to win the
case in 2015 [see The Wall in Battir].

Using LIDAR scanners and ground-penetrating radar we undertook a
complete forensic survey of the former WW2 concentration camp of Staro
Sajmište in Belgrade (2013) [see Living Death Camps]. We worked with
Migeurop in relation to the death of migrants in the Mediterranean
[see Left-to-Die Boat].

Francesco Sebregondi (Forensic Architecture) presenting the White
Phosphorus report in the UN Office at Geneva, 12 November 2012. Photo:
Forensic Architecture.

Public Reception

FA’s evidence files, taking the shape of models, drawings, maps,
web-based interactive cartographies, films, and animations have also
been exhibited in leading cultural and art institutions [see
Exhibitions]. The Victoria and Albert Museum in London purchased some
of our visual material for their permanent collection (2015). FA’s
impact was further consolidated by academic reviews [see Forensis
review in Society and Space, in Radical Philosophy], mainstream media
reports [see Press] a documentary film produced about our work [see
Architecture of Violence], numerous academic reviews, and was
presented in several keynote lectures [see Lecture at UniSA Nelson
Mandela, Lecture at Peter Wall Institute of Advanced Studies].


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