Born in Haifa and for many years a noted academic with an openly radical bent, Eyal Weizman would go on to become the co-founder and most prominent public representative of Forensic Architecture, an agency founded in 2010 with a mandate to focus on both research and advocacy, especially in instances where military and policing powers may have been misused (cough, cough). In February of 2020 Weizman was barred from attaining a travel visa with which to enter the United States when an algorithm purportedly flagged him as a security risk. Forensic Architecture conceives of itself as a counter-forensics, turning the forensic gaze back against the State; it is also a new species of transsystemic systems analysis appropriate to an era of satellite imagery, metadata, and multimedia. In a manner analogous to international travel, the thorough consideration of any event or event variable must be performed with respect paid to and consideration for the qualifiable terms of the active surrounding systems bordered everywhere by other systems, surging or waning, and so on, nobody ever quite sure who all is watching. A huge part of what Weizman himself targets are the preconceptions of Statist ideologies. That being said, what most excites about Forensic Architecture as a body with a whole lot of organs is the timeliness and extraordinary rigour of the work carried out in its name. Weizman: “[Forensic Architecture] regards the common elements of our built environment—buildings, details, cities, and landscapes, as well as their representations in media and as data—as entry points from which to interrogate contemporary processes.” The architectural analysis of “incidents in their contexts” seeks to pull from the incidents, contexts, and “their microphysical details the longer threads of political and social processes.” Weizman makes it clear that there are three tiers to his organization’s work: field (data collection), laboratory (transformation of data into evidence), and forum (the presentation of evidence and findings). Part of what makes this work so distinct from most theory, however, is that the “forum” dimension of the agency’s work does include presentations made in a juridicial context, whether the courts in question exist within nation states or as international institutions/bodies (like the ICC). There are many more kinds of evidence of any given event than you may imagine and these not merely reducible to “drawings, models, aerial and ground-level photographs of buildings” and that sort of everyday pedestrian stuff: evidence relating to the analysis of buildings and built environments; basic criminal-investigation-type forensics; audio-visual collection/collation by/for news media outlets or social media users (all significant events are multi-camera); remote sensing technologies; osteobiography; historical document analysis; direct interviews; a general analytics of testimony; and analysis of climate factors (i.e. historical patterns of aridity and desertification). As for architecture itself, Weizman repeatedly makes the case that buildings and built spaces are capable of prehension (versus apprehension or comprehension). An example would be how “it takes years for an air bubble trapped between a wall and a fast-drying paint to make its way up the building facade.” The responsibility for the 2013 collapse of a large sweatshop in Bangladesh is split, argues Weizman, between the structure itself, the surrounding infrastructure, and global economic systems. Drone attacks on buildings also involve holes in the roofs of buildings, the ordnance—usually Lockheed Martin Hellfire antitank missiles—tending to explode inside rooms deeper within a given structure, maximizing kill rates while leaving most of the structure intact. Weizman looks at how various nation states—especially Israel—use humanitarian rhetoric to their own ends, producing a troubling space for discursive and juridicial redress or anything resembling even the intestinal rumblings of accountability. Weizman conceives of a new extraterritorialization of the demos in terms of modern combat, climate change, and environmental violence. How does one operate in the zone of resource wars and chaotic mobility, a great big spinning machine that eats refugees, while we are each of us casually gathered like sleepwalkers into our little groups, not unlike the dazed and inattentive players of Pokémon GO, fad of yesteryear? Weizman advises that you operate “close to and under the threshold of detectability.” I would add that if you have a kayak you can be both under and above the threshold of detectability at one and the same fanciful-ass time. Just saying.
Black Sunday (John Frankenheimer, 1977)
No comments:
Post a Comment