Study: The Architecture of Forensics
August 2, 2021
Indicating more than a set of investigative practices that respond to crime, forensics has come to connote a kind of secular faith in an animate material world—a phantasmagoria, in which material appears to both “hold secrets” and “speak back to us.” As such, forensics makes crime investigation appear not only the moral and administrative responsibility of a state, but also a magical power in and of itself. This response offers a brief analysis of the forensics imagination, as exemplified by Forensic Architecture’s rhetoric around its own work, and suggests some of the entanglements that come along with it.
