Negative Publicity and Evidentiary Aesthetics

This seminar series introduces the means and modes by which architecture — as a contemporary set of techniques and as a body of knowledge — can become an investigative and evidentiary mode through which to interrogate contemporary politics and conflict.

Through the study of fortifications, border devices, digital surveillance, and infrastructural networks we already understand the way in which architecture could function as a form of slow violence, but with conflict increasingly becoming urban phenomena, played out within dense media and data environments, we also need to come to grips with the ways in which the relation between conflict and space is transforming.

At the shadow of new technologies of capture and detection – increasingly based on pattern recognition and other neural networks used in machine learning — also emerge ever more sophisticated techniques of secrecy and camouflage as well as new avenues for independent investigators. Counter investigating state policy and its associated secrecy are crucial because the facts of conflict are ever and always contested, incidents can have multiple readings, and states and security forces have a tendency for cover-up or denial in an environment now commonly referred to as ‘post truth’.

Each of the seminars — building upon the work of the Forensic Architecture agency, its collaborators and friends — introduces a concept that bridges between architecture media and conflict.

Guests including Susan Schuppli, Lorenzo Pezzani, Laura Poitras, Edmund Clark will introduce concepts such as ‘secrecy’, ‘elasticity’, ’resolution’, ‘material aesthetics’, ‘slow violence’, ‘lethal algorithms’ and ‘artificial vision’.