Forensic Architecture and the Aesthetics of Post-Human Testimony

Abstract

Forensic Architecture, a civilian-led open source investigative agency, synthesizes the disciplines of investigative journalism, fine art, legal studies, and forensics to redefine witnessing, testimony, evidence, and the necropolitical contours of the digital age. This article examines Forensic Architecture’s approach to the visualization of violence and the resulting displacement of the body as the primary site of forensic evidence and the living witness as the pinnacle of legal testimony. In this process, the agency produces post-human testimony, thus reconceptualizing the link between politics and aesthetics while questioning human agency. As a result, Forensic Architecture foregrounds materiality as an epistemic category, creating a post-human framework for understanding the vicissitudes of state violence. The agency also recalibrates evidential logic by transforming digitized phenomena into an assemblage and binding this to discursive forums. Thus, by examining different permutations of state violence both on the ground and in virtual space, the advent of Forensic Architecture marks a new era in which post-human testimony shifts away from compassionate identification on the part of the viewer with the wounded body and instead reveals infrastructures of domination as a means to recompose and alter the visualization of political conflicts, and by extension, our perception of human life and death.