Forensic Architecture and the Aesthetics of Post-Human Testimony

Abstract

Forensic Architecture, a civilian-led open source investigative agency, synthesizes the disciplines of investigative journalism, fine art, legal studies, and forensics to redefine witnessing, testimony, evidence, and the necropolitical contours of the digital age. This article examines Forensic Architecture’s approach to the visualization of violence and the resulting displacement of the body as the primary site of forensic evidence and the living witness as the pinnacle of legal testimony. In this process, the agency produces post-human testimony, thus reconceptualizing the link between politics and aesthetics while questioning human agency. As a result, Forensic Architecture foregrounds materiality as an epistemic category, creating a post-human framework for understanding the vicissitudes of state violence. The agency also recalibrates evidential logic by transforming digitized phenomena into an assemblage and binding this to discursive forums. Thus, by examining different permutations of state violence both on the ground and in virtual space, the advent of Forensic Architecture marks a new era in which post-human testimony shifts away from compassionate identification on the part of the viewer with the wounded body and instead reveals infrastructures of domination as a means to recompose and alter the visualization of political conflicts, and by extension, our perception of human life and death.

Keywords:

• Forensics
• open source investigations
• post-human
• testimony
• aesthetics

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Throughout this article, I use the phrase Forensic Architecture and the name Eyal Weizman interchangeably to signal the collective work of the agency.

2 Geolocation is a term used in open-source investigations to stipulate the exact or approximate coordinates of where an image was shot as a verification mechanism to ensure that the image can be used as evidence in a court of law. Chronolocation refers to the exact or approximate time frame in which an image was shot. This can be determined via shadow analysis, bus signage, gas stations, or other infrastructure tied to seasons, months, or even specific days. Chronolocation, in more cases than not, tends to be approximate and geolocation more precise.

3 The post-human turn presents the world as an entanglement of organic and inorganic, conscious and unconscious, animal, plant, human, machine, and materials to view phenomena from vantage points that rest beyond the human. There are various strains of post-human philosophy, including machine consciousness, animal consciousness, or a broader sense of ecological consciousness; other strains consider the alteration of the human body into a cyborg-like vision that will make humans unrecognizable in the future. Undergirding these strains is a shift away from binary understandings of humans as separate from or superior to other forms of life or matter in favor of exploring the blurred boundaries between all life and matter.