Open Verification

The term has been first proposed by Alan Sekula. See: Thomas Keenan, “Counter-forensics and Photography,” Grey Room 55 (Spring 2014): 58–77. The term first appeared in Allan Sekula, “Photography and the Limits of National Identity,” Culturefront 2.3 (Fall 1993): 54–55.

In her essay on lying in politics, Hannah Arendt writes: “deception, the deliberate falsehood and the outright lie used as legitimate means to achieve political ends, have been with us since the beginning of recorded history. Truthfulness has never been counted among the political virtues, and lies have always been regarded as justifiable tools in political dealings.” Hannah Arendt, Crises of the Republic: Lying in politics, Civil disobedience, On violence, Thoughts on politics and revolution (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972), 4 and 45. For a short extract of Arendt’s essay in the New York Review of Books, see ➝.

An interesting presentation of this can be found in Metahaven’s Eurasia: Questions of Happiness (2018).

In 1976, the American tobacco conglomerate, Philip Morris, released a public statement to a growing evidence base on the health effects of smoking: “none of the things which have been found in tobacco smoke are at concentrations which can be considered harmful. Anything can be considered harmful. Apple sauce is harmful if you get too much of it.” “Tobacco Explained: The truth about the tobacco industry… in its own words,” World Health Organisation, November 2018, ➝.

See Rick Searle “How dark epistemology explains the rise of Donald Trump,” IEET, March 7, 2016, ➝; Michael Adrien Peters, “Anxieties of Knowing,” Educational Philosophy and Theory 46, no. 10 (2014): 1093–1097, ➝, Eliezer Yudkowsky, “Dark Side Epistemology,” LESSWRONG, October 18, 2008, ➝, and Jesse McWilliams “Dark epistemology: An assessment of philosophical trends in the black metal music of Mayhem,” Metal Music Studies 1, no. 1 (October 2014): 25–38, ➝.

“Suppose that an earthquake destroys not only lives, buildings, and objects but also the instruments used to measure earthquakes directly and indirectly.” Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 56.

James Harkin, “What Happened In Douma? Searching For Facts In The Fog Of Syria’s Propaganda War,” The Intercept, February 9 2019, ➝.

Philip Rucker and Robert Costa, “Bannon vows a daily fight for ‘deconstruction of the administrative state’,” Washington Post, February 23, 2017, ➝.

See Trevor Paglen, and AC Thompson, Torture Taxi: On the Trail of the CIA's Rendition Flights (New York: Melville House, 2006). See also Edmund Clark and Crofton Black, “Negative Publicity: Artefacts of Extraordinary Rendition,” (Magnum Foundation, 2016), ➝.

The investigations of Forensic Architecture, Bellingcat and Truth Hounds, a Ukrainian human rights monitoring group are explored in further depth in Oliver Hahn and Florian Stalph, eds., Digital Investigative Journalism: Data, Visual Analytics and Innovative Methodologies in International Reporting (Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 150.

For example: most images online are the standard .jpg format. .jpg is a form of compression that reduces the size of an image by finding commonalities between pixels, but every camera does this slightly differently. Looking for deviations might help find out whether and which pixels have been shifted or manipulated. Much of the vertical authentication work taking place today is now being delegated to machine learning algorithms.

Rebecca J. Hamilton, "User-Generated Evidence," Columbia Journal of Transnational Law 57, no. 1, 2018.

The International Criminal Court in The Hague ICC is increasingly moving towards multimediality and open source evidence and verification in its prosecutive work. See Emma Irving, “And so it begins… Social Media evidence in an ICC arrest warrant,” Opinio Juris, August 17, 2017, ➝.

In Forensic Architecture’s work, physical and digital models are more than mere three-dimensional representations of proposed structures—as they are typically used in architectural practice—but rather function as analytical or operative devices. Spatial and non-spatial models provide a theoretical understanding of the way in which particular incidents may have unfolded, or can help make predictions as to how certain situations might develop. Others are used to test, simulate, create, and present evidence. Operative Models, to paraphrase filmmaker Harun Farocki’s concept of "operative images" are entities that not only represent, but "do" things in the world, serving as essential means to construct evidence and assemble a forum around it.

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Haaretz Editorial: “Israel Must Put an End to Bedouin Village Blood Libel”, June 4, 2019, ➝.

When facts are established in this way, they operate somewhat like a contract, not unlike how theorist Ariella Azoulay conceptualized the “civil contract of photography,” as “a virtual political community, that is not dictated by a ruling power, but opens new possibilities for political action, encounter and conditions of visibility between the photographed, photographer and spectator.” Ariella Azoulay, The Civil Contract of Photography (New York: Zone Books, 2008).

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An interview I gave on Russia Today: Going Underground with Afshin Rattansi, January 25, 2017, captures several of these lines of attack. See also Eliot Higgins, “Russia’s Bizarre, Barely Coherent Defence It Didn’t Bomb Hospitals in Syria,” Bellingcat, February 17, 2016, ➝.

SWI swissinfo.ch - English “Bashar al-Assad speaks to Swiss television,” YouTube, October 20, 2016, ➝. See also Tony Cartalucci, “Amnesty International admits Syrian “Saydnaya” Report Fabricated Entirely in UK,” OffGuardian, February 10, 2017, ➝.

There are a host of Israeli organization that collaborates with Israel’s recent right-nationalist governments to spread doubt, incite hate, and silence civil society and human rights groups critical of the occupation. They claim that holding a critical view of Israel disqualifies one from research on it. For them, my colleagues and I are “obsessive Israel bashers” who manipulate evidence to suit a political aim and smear the Israeli army, often pointing to the petition I signed in 2009 against Israel’s attack on Gaza. To them, this means that no matter which human rights organization or journalistic group we work with, we are not doing anything other than faking evidence. See “Amnesty’s “Gaza Platform”: All Window Dressing, No Substance,” NGO Monitor, July 7, 2015, ➝.

For further reading, see Eyal Weizman and Thomas Keenan, Mengele’s Skull: The Advent of a Forensic Aesthetics (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2012); Eyal Weizman, Forensic Architecture: Violence at the Threshold of Detectability (New York: Zone Books, 2017); and Eyal Weizman and Matt Fuller, Investigative Aesthetics (Verso, forthcoming).

A precedent, suggested to us by Yve-Alain Bois, is Soviet Russia’s Factography, a collective enterprise that, in the 1920’s and 30’s, was geared towards the construction of facts, using technological and scientific methods, information media and graphics, as opposed to merely documenting them. For more on Soviet factography, see: Ingrid Nordgaard, ““In Search of the Present Tense”: Soviet Factography and Collectivism,” NYU Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia, April 6, 2013. ➝; See also Devin Fore, “Soviet Factography: Production Art in an Information Age,” Chto Delat, August 6, 2016, ➝.

Forensic Architecture’s team investigating the murder of Pavlos Fyssas in Athens consisted of Christina Varvia (Project Lead), Stefanos Levidis (Project Coordinator), Simone Rowat (Video Research and Production) Sofia Georgovassili, Fivos Avgerinos Dorette Panagiotopoulou, Nicholas Masterton, Stefan Laxness, Robert Trafford, Sarah Nankivell, Lawrence Abu Hamdan (Sound analysis advisor), Shakeeb Abu Hamdan (Sound analysis advisor), ➝.

Our gratitude to Anselm Franke and Bernd Scherer, Rosario Güiraldes, Cuauhtémoc Medina and Ferran Barenblit, Ayse Gülec, Richard Birkett and Stefan Kalmár, and Maria Hlavajova and Wietske Maas.

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The young Swedish naturalist Carolus Linnaeus is one example of such a figure, whose work was somewhere between a watercolourist and taxonomer, a landscape interpreter and species vault archivist.

Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity (New York: Zone Books, 2010), 17; Pamela H. Smith, The Body of the Artisan: Art and Experience in the Scientific Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006).

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See Isabelle Stengers, “The Cosmopolitical Proposal,” in Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel, eds., Making Things Public (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005), 994–1003.