Tuesday / October 23, 2018 / 6:00 PM - 7:30 PM
Eyal Weizman
The Art Institute of Chicago, Rubloff Auditorium, 230 South Columbus Drive, Chicago
Eyal Weizman is an architect, professor of Spatial and Visual Cultures, and founder and director of the research agency Forensic Architecture based at Goldsmiths, University of London. The agency consists of architects, artists, filmmakers, journalists, software developers, scientists, lawyers, and an extended network of collaborators from a wide variety of fields and disciplines. It is committed to the development and dissemination of new evidentiary techniques and undertakes advanced architectural and media investigations on behalf of international prosecutors, human rights and civil society groups, as well as political and environmental justice organizations, including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, B’Tselem, Bureau of Investigative Journalism, and the United Nations, among others.
Tools and techniques developed by Forensic Architecture for analyzing and presenting state and corporate violations of human rights across the globe involve modeling dynamic events as they unfold in space and time by creating navigable 3D models, filmic animations of environments undergoing conflict, and conceiving of interactive cartographies on the urban or architectural scale. The agency also develops open source software that facilitates collective research together with victim groups and stakeholders. Through detailed and critical investigations, Forensic Architecture presents how public truth is produced—technologically, architecturally, and aesthetically—and how it can be used to confront authority and to expose new forms of state-led violence.
