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Arriving late o his talk at e-flux, a sheepish Eyal Weizman admitted that he had mistakenly gone to the old address of the digital platform-cum-cultural salon. He didn’t clarify which of his host’s three prior New York outposts he meant, as to do so would risk dwelling on the details that don’t matter. His lecture was a meticulous, if ranging, presentation of the details that do: environment, narrative’s deceptions, gradations of truth.
Counterforensics, which characterizes the work Weizman oversees at the London-based interdisciplinary research agency Forensic Architecture (FA), turns its “gaze against states.” It is, evidently, a self-conscious practice: There are always more images to analyze, more drone footage to decode, more spaces to map. “We are doubting our own methods; we are doubting our own efficacy; we are engaging in our work because this is what we know how to do,” he admitted. To insist that everything is perfectly under control would be pretense, if not fraud. It would be akin to thinking like a state.
Though he spoke mostly of FA’s probing of Israeli denials in its horrific war in Gaza, Weizman periodically veered into wider discursive territory. “Now if you believe—and I don’t—the Israeli army and the New York Times—and I don’t—but let’s just quote what we don’t believe,” he said. He was articulating a basic anxiety that keeps the forensic architect in a permanent state of unbelief. Toward the end of his talk, Weizman projected an image ofa CNN screencap of an Israeli military spokesperson holding an A4 printout of an Al Jazeera screengrab of a rocket that hit Al-Ahli Hospital on October 17, 2023. (FA conducted an extensive investigation into the explosion.) It was, he said, a “metamedia moment.” Media narratives pile upon one another—a game of telephone, a snake eating its own tail, an infinite nesting of meaning. Networks clamor against one another to report breaking news. “Who has the scoop?” Weizman asked the crowd. A rhetorical question.