Controversy dogs Forensic Architecture and that is not surprising. It is a research agency which investigates human rights violations principally committed by states, police and military forces and corporations. Its current exhibition at Manchester’s Whitworth Gallery, Cloud Studies, (part of the Manchester International Festival) consists of the details of nine such investigations. And controversy almost torpedoed it right at the start.
What happened was that an unequivocal statement of Forensic Architecture’s support for the Palestinian cause was placed at the entrance to the exhibition. This was quickly followed by a complaint from UK Lawyers for Israel saying that the statement contained inflammatory language and portrayed Israel as an occupation force engaged in ethnic cleansing, apartheid and human and environmental destruction. The Whitworth removed the statement. So Forensic Architecture closed the exhibition. So then the Whitworth reinstated it with caveats. So then the exhibition reopened. There is a Guardian article interview which gives FA’s view of events here. There is a statement by the Whitworth here. UKLFI’s version of events can be read here. So you can make your own minds up. I have no intention whatsoever of charging into these tangled thickets. What really interests me about the exhibition is not what it says but the means by which it says it. It’s that old bugbear of mine again: the digital medium.
Digital reconstruction of events lies at the heart of Forensic Architecture’s method. (Image © Forensic Architecture)
The exhibition is in three rooms. The first contains a large screen giving a twenty minute or so overview of the nine investigations. The second and third rooms contain smaller screens with headphones each of which gives details of the cases investigated. These include: Israeli actions in the Gaza Strip; ecocide in Indonesia; oil and gas pollution in Argentina; environmental racism in Louisiana; and the use of tear gas in Chile. The link between all of these cases and the exhibition’s central image is the toxic cloud. “Bomb clouds” FA says “are architecture in gaseous form”. So the exhibition alleges serious crimes by states and corporations and the evidence is set out through cutting-edge digital techniques accompanied by both narration and the written word.
The digital techniques might be best placed under the general heading of data visualisation. FA’s list includes 3D Modelling, Fieldwork, Geolocation, Fluid Dynamics, Image Complex (linking many partial images to create 3D models), Machine Learning, Open Source Intelligence, Remote Sensing and Synchronisation Software Development. Eyal Weizmann, the Director of FA, has referred to it as “counter forensics”. In essence, it uses this advanced technology to detect largely unnoticed evidence (which it terms “weak sensors”) to undermine otherwise plausible denials by parties – usually states or corporations – which have almost exclusive access to more conventional forms of evidence such as official witnesses, control of the scene of the crime or scientific knowledge.
So far – so good. But I think we run into a problem when we try to define precisely what it is that we are looking at. The digital medium is a very, very slippery customer. What is this mixture of image, word and sound? Evidence? Polemic? Accusation? Documentary? Representation? As an example, there is a section of the opening overview in which rapid slides have a voiceover and - on top of that - there is superimposed operatic music. This is a digital cocktail of visual, word and sound with great emotive force but questionable evidential status.
A very busy screen. To the left data visualisation. In the middle real time still photograph. To the right talking head. Behind, it’s hard to say but a mixture of video and data overlay maybe. All this was accompanied by a narrated commentary. That’s a lot of information to take in. (Screen grab from video sequence © forensic Architecture.)
FA themselves say that their work is “for use in national and international courtrooms, parliamentary inquiries, citizen tribunals, community forums, academic institutions and the media. We also present our findings in galleries and museums when other sites of accountability are inaccessible.” Yet in a criminal courtroom (in common law jurisdictions at least) there is a very clear process: there is a prosecution and there is a defence; there is cross-examination and there is a jury. That is completely different from, say, a gallery or a museum. Can one evidential size possibly fit all of these fora?*
For me, at this point, confusion creeps in and at the heart of the confusion is the digital medium. The original evidence in these cases is often captured by eyewitnesses on digital devices such as the mobile phone. It is flashed around the world in seconds. The resulting flood of information, verbal and visual, can then be reconstructed by digital techniques into highly rhetorical displays such as Cloud Studies. The medium is so fast, so slick, so persuasive and so promiscuous. Data bundles can be chopped, sliced, fried, roasted, boiled, and mashed to suit all tastes. What starts off apparently as the case for the prosecution suddenly becomes an art exhibition. This is uniquely a characteristic of digital media and would have been impossible with analogue techniques.
A triptych shown as evidence of Israeli spraying of toxic chemicals to damage Palestinian crops. What I see to the right (ie main screen) is a data mock-up of the overall scene; in the middle a real time video with the aircraft digitally blocked in red plus subtitle of video soundtrack; and left an aerial shot of the territory in question. It is very persuasive - but precisely what is its status in an art gallery? (Screen grab from video sequence© Forensic Architecture.)
A 2015 UN Report proposed two useful phrases to describe this new digital tendency. The first was ‘accountability regimes’ which it defined as ‘any system competent to assign innocence or guilt’. The second was ‘advocacy spaces’ which it defined as ‘any forum in which narratives of innocence or guilt relating to particular events may be proposed’. In other words, the flood of digital information is leaving the courtroom behind. Evidence is in the public realm instantaneously and the legal process limps in its wake. The problem is that a gallery turns itself into an advocacy space only without any of the procedures which due process provides. This is the real problem with the statement at the entrance to the exhibition: it is a declaration of guilt and innocence before the presentation of the evidence in the exhibition itself. For me, that turns the exhibition into polemic.
I’m uneasy about all of this. I have great respect for what Forensic Architecture does and the skill with which it does it. It assembles very persuasive cases against the states and corporations which usually hold all the evidential cards. I also think the Whitworth is a great gallery but, in this case, both the Whitworth and the Festival seem to be presenting digital rhetoric as some sort of artistic statement. The clue after all is in the organisation’s name: Forensic Architecture. ‘Forensic’ means ‘used in courts of law’. The gallery does not seem to have foreseen the obvious criticism: that the exhibition might be viewed as a platform for very serious and well-documented accusations of a criminal nature without any of the procedural safeguards to be expected when such allegations are made. So they had little defence when UKLFI made its complaint.
In a video interview with FA (here) the Director of the Whitworth, Alistair Hudson, says this is part of the gallery’s new direction – to present “art not as representation but art as operation”. Art in pursuit of a cause? I really hope he knows what he is doing. The controversy and confusion which marked the opening of the exhibition are hardly reassuring.
*You can read more about FA’s explanation of its methods (and sign up for their newsletter) here
The exhibition continues at the Whitworth Gallery until October 17th.