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A vice chairman of the Whitney Museum of American Art stepped down on Thursday after months of protests over his company’s sale of tear gas, culminating in the withdrawal of eight artists last week from the prestigious Whitney Biennial exhibition. — The New York Times
The decision came days after London-based Forensic Architecture joined seven other artists in withdrawing from the 2019 Whitney Biennial exhibition. Kanders struck a petulant tone in his resignation letter, saying, “The targeted campaign of attacks against me and my company that... View full entry
Forensic Architecture has announced its decision to withdraw from the 2019 Whitney Biennial. The London-based research group has also requested to replace its 10-minute video about the global spread of tear gas and bullets produced by companies linked to Whitney Museum vice chairman Warren Kanders, with new evidence they’ve found that directly links the weapons manufacturer to violence on the Israeli-Palestinian border in Gaza. — Hyperallergic
The fallout over the unethical business ties of certain members of the Whitney Museum of American Art's board of trustees continues unabated. Forensic Architecture's decision to join seven other exhibitors in withdrawing from the prestigious 2019 Whitney Biennial exhibition comes as the art... View full entry
The curators for the 2019 Chicago Architecture Biennial have announced early highlight contributors who will create newly commissioned projects and other materials for the exhibition. The initial list is comprised of 51 practices and practitioners from 19 countries. It includes architects... View full entry
Over the last few months, the team at Forensic Architecture, housed at London’s Goldsmiths University in Lewisham, has been working to piece together data and footage from the event using a mixture of video and imagery from Youtube, Periscope and other forms of social media, as well as footage from Sky News, which is a partner on the project. — Wired
In June of 2017 the Grenfell Tower fire killed 71 in the London public housing block. Criminal investigations are still ongoing with no one yet held accountable. Forensic Architecture has taken on the case in order to piece together how the fire spread within minutes throughout the building. By... View full entry
Forensic Architecture [...] is an agency based at Goldsmiths, University of London. The organisation’s founder and director is Eyal Weizman, a British-Israeli architect. Its primary mission is research, to “develop evidentiary systems in relation to specific cases”; in so doing, it acts as “an architectural detective agency”, working with NGOs and human rights lawyers to uncover facts that confound the stories told by police, military, states and corporations. — The Guardian
Weizman conceives of his work as an alternative practice, aiming to create a sub-discipline of architecture using architectural evidence in cases of war crimes or other human rights violations. Calling their activity "counter-forensics", the organization does not take commissions from... View full entry
Eyal Weizman is a London-based Israeli architect and Professor of Spatial and Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London. His work focuses on architecture as a form of political intervention and the discipline's role in modern urban warfare. For the past couple of years, Weizman's... View full entry
FA investigators take standard architectural and digital tools such as telemetry, video-footage syncing and shadow clocks, and repurpose them to reveal the secrets of conflict zones. Weizman's team has also pioneered plume analysis...Weizman and his colleagues' brief is as wide-ranging as man's cruelty to man: they mine the information seam where enemies clash, where migrants drown, natives are dispossessed and civilians bombed. — Wired
For the January 2016 issue of WIRED magazine, Michael Hodges profiled the work of Forensic Architecture (FA) and the organisation's director Eyal Weizman. View full entry
Besides the thing itself, architecture concerns itself with two kinds of sign about it: iconic signs and symbols. Iconic signs resemble the thing itself. They are the plans and elevations and isometrics. The more symbolic architecture is that of language, the word, the logo and so forth. The postmodern turn shifted the emphasis from the iconic to the symbolic.
I think [Eyal] Weizman has created an architecture about a whole other kind of sign – the index.
— Public Seminar
"Indexical signs are traces of events: where there is smoke there is fire. The smoke does not resemble the fire. It is not an icon. Nor does it have a code like a symbolic sign system. Forensics is a matter of working backwards from the index to the event of which it is the sign, like in a... View full entry
Weizman’s new book, 'The Conflict Shoreline' (Steidl in association with Cabinet Books, 2015), a richly illustrated volume produced in collaboration with American photographer Fazal Sheikh about the displacement of the Bedouins in the Negev/Naqab desert. — Los Angeles Review of Books
George Prochnik and Eyal Weizman discuss the latest work by the Forensic Architecture team, Bedouin displacement in the Negev and "threshold of detectability." View full entry
Weizman has also made a name for himself as the chief proponent of “forensic architecture”, by which he analyses the impacts of urban warfare for clues about the crimes that were perpetrated there. To Weizman, buildings are weapons. When he looks out across the landscape of the occupied Palestinian West Bank [...] he sees a battlefield. “The weapons and ammunitions are very simple elements: they are trees, they are terraces, they are houses. They are barriers.” — theguardian.com
"It’s an attempt to really use architecture intelligence and design intelligence to unpack violations of international law," Weizman says of Forensic Architecture. Along with SITU Research, he and his team have developed a technique called video-to-space analysis to harvest spatial data from cell phone videos and photos, analyzing footage, sometimes from multiple sources, to model and recreate chaotic events to better understand what happened on the ground. — fastcodesign.com
The latest edition of ShowCase highlights CRAB Studio’s Abedian School of Architecture in Queensland, Australia.Plus, the fourth installment in Screen/Print (Archinect’s experimentation in translation across media) features "fruity labors" from the quarterly journal MAS Context's 20th... View full entry
The “architecture” in forensic architecture would thus designate, not the product of building design, but rather an expanded field of spatial investigation, imaging and representation, while the word “forensic” should be understood as the very condition that enables architectural research to perform politically, that is, to enter a complex political or juridical calculus. — Forensic Architecture
Eyal Weizman is the Principal Investigator for Forensic Architecture, which is a European Research Council funded project (2011-2014) hosted by the Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths University of London within the Department of Visual Cultures. View full entry
