Investigative Aesthetics

Matthew Fuller is Professor of Cultural Studies at the Department of Media and Communications, at Goldsmiths, University of London. He is the author of Media Ecologies, and with Andrew Goffey, Evil Media. Eyal Weizman directs the Centre for Research Architecture and the international investigative project, Forensic Architecture. He is the author of Hollow Land, The Least of All Possible Evils, and Forensic Architecture. After a hugely acclaimed exhibition at the ICA, Forensic Architecture was shortlisted for the 2018 Turner Prize. They have exhibited around the world, and in 2019, their work was included in the Whitney Biennial.

Increasingly artists have become political activists. Their work has taken on the shape of a criminal investigator. Where does this turn toward forensics come from? How do we understand it as a aesthetic practice? The words investigative and aesthetics seem like an uneasy match. But this book claims that expanded aesthetic practices can powerfully reshape our approach to the question of truth. Shifts in technology and new ways of thinking together offer a means of searching for facts and understanding them anew. This book proposes that the current period is defined by new forms of aesthetic power composed both by sensing, detection and prediction and the torrential proliferation of images and data. To evade and oppose this form of state-corporate domination we can learn to join the dots between traces within our interwoven digital, built and natural environments. Investigative aesthetics can also enable new collaborative forms of verification. Rather than rely on official expertise it calls for an open process that combines the perspectives of communities exposed to state or corporate violence with those of artists, activists and scientists. This new practice takes place equally in the field, the art studio as in the scientific laboratory, online and in the streets, as it strives towards the construction of a new common sensing.

The artist as an investigator: the role of the political art in the world