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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 Israel…