In 2011, Eyal Weizman described forensic architecture as both the “archeology of the very recent past,” which deploys the practice of architecture as a “sensor” to reconstruct war crimes from the evidence registered in images and materials of the built environment, and a “form of assembling for the future,” in which architecture acts as an “agent” that, by providing new means of interpreting material evidence, begins to construct new forums (or transform existing forums) for judging and acting upon that evidence. This transformation or reconstruction of forums is enacted through the forensic aesthetics of demonstrations, dramatizations, projections, and performances, which constitute the “mode of appearance of things in forums” and build up the credibility of the interpreters of those things-as-evidence. Forensics, in this understanding, is both a “tool of investigation” and a “means of persuasion.”

The projects undertaken by the Forensic Architecture Group at Goldsmiths College, founded and led by Weizman, as well as SITU Research, led by Bradley Samuels, bring together architects, designers, artists, filmmakers, scientists, lawyers, human rights activists, NGOs, and members of threatened communities to document, analyze, and re-visualize human rights violations. These collaborations have been used in landmark legal cases and human rights campaigns, formed the spine of the influential exhibition and book Forensis (2014) at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) in Berlin, and received both academic reviews and broad mass-media coverage. In short, they have succeeded in transforming both the field and forums in which they work, by developing new tools and techniques to retrieve material evidence, and changing the norms and expectations around how that evidence will be presented. In particular, the techniques they have developed for reconstructing the space-timelines of events in cases where investigators are denied access to the scene—combining remote sensing (detailed analysis of satellite imagery) with geotagged eyewitness videos and personal testimony—have incredible potential to upend the uneven dynamic of visibility between oppressive states and their citizens, what Weizman has called the “threshold of detectability” of violence.

While the two groups are no longer collaborating, the projects they produced during the period of collaboration have clearly informed the trajectories they are now pursuing separately. The two collaborations I would highlight in this regard are the Left-to-Die Boat investigation, which turned the data generated by NATO surveillance of the Mediterranean into evidence of NATO’s responsibility for their failure to assist 63 migrants who died while drifting for 14 days within that surveillance area, and the large-scale Drone Strikes inquiry, which uses spatial analysis to map the broader patterns underlying covert drone warfare campaigns, and also examines in detail the architectural aftermath of 30 drone strikes that killed civilians in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and Gaza. A later project by Forensic Architecture that continues along the same lines is Rafah: Black Friday, which reconstructs the destruction of August 1-4, 2014, in Rafah, Gaza, by cross-referencing geotagged cell-phone videos found on social media with satellite imagery and inputting them into a 3-D model of Rafah. Meanwhile, to help with prosecutions related to the massacre at the Euromaidan protests in Ukraine, SITU is currently developing an open-source software platform that can automatically sort thousands of time and location-tagged cell-phone videos of a single event into a searchable space-timeline. And Forensic Architecture has released open-source software called PATTRN that customizes data visualization tools to enable participatory fact mapping for conflict monitoring, citizen journalism, and human rights research.

Many of these projects combine what I would describe as “warm data”—the stories of eyewitnesses or survivors, describing the worst days of their lives—with evidence that can be perceived as “cold data” or more simply cold, hard facts—geotagging, remote sensing, 3.

D renderings, forensic oceanography, forensic audio analysis. We judge warm data based on the credibility of the witness, while we judge cold data based on the competence or reputation of the expert presenting it. Mingling the two forms of data crosses the categories of witness and expert in an unexpected way, inserting into the forum of judgement the suggestion that the ultimate expert on events of this kind—from drone strikes to boats left to drift—should be the superstes, the witness-survivor, the one who was there. And if there is no body left to speak? Look to the shadow left on the wall, the absence of impacts from the fragments of the bomb. That is where the body was, where the flesh absorbed the metal. Forensic architecture tells us: the building can testify; the building was there.