GIDEST’s second seminar series, in 2015-16, opened with a visit from the architect Eyal Weizman, founding director of the research agency Forensic Architecture. When coronavirus broke in the UK, we called Eyal at his home in London to find out what he and the agency were thinking and doing at this critical time. From GIDEST With Love #4 is an edited transcript of his conversation with GIDEST director Hugh Raffles.

We suggest reading while listening to Brian Eno’s Music for Airports.

Hugh: So could you update us on how Forensic Architecture’s work has been affected by the pandemic?

Eyal: Right now we monitor the way in which the pandemic has effectively aggravated each and every case that we're dealing with, from the situation on the Greek-Turkish border, through to Hong Kong, to digital surveillance of our partners and collaborators. We started Forensic Architecture at the end of 2010 beginning of 2011. Somehow almost precisely coinciding with the Arab Spring. We've now undertaken fifty-five investigations in twenty different countries. 
 
The way in which the conflicts that erupted in the aftermath of the Arab Spring have intersected with media has been the template for a lot of the work we’re doing. That's to say, conflict undertaken in an environment connected to the Internet with people who have a lot of social media skills and motivation to report from all sides around a particular incident, but that went hand in hand also with a certain weaponization of information, and a certain degree of negation and denial.
 
Take Syria, for example. A local incident, such as the dropping by the Syrian Air Force of a chlorine canister in Douma in April 2018—the debate over whether it was a chemical strike or a false flag attack gathered geopolitical implications. Likewise, there is always a relation between an incident and the long duration of politics and structural forces around truth claims. This is most commonly captured by the often abused police justification for shooting innocents as a "split second decision"—we must always ask what is the long duration of the split second.

Whether it’s an aerial attack in Syria, Libya, or in Palestine, our work is usually based on a dozen or so, perhaps a couple of dozen videos, not too long, up to a minute long or so, and we need to reconstruct the incident from just that.

In contrast, I just came off a big conference call with members of the protest movement in Hong Kong who commissioned us to undertake independent investigation of the police repression of the protests that have gone on there since last June. They were speaking about how the state is using the lockdown to go through and process the evidence they've been gathering. The problem with digital evidence, in particular in the Hong Kong police tracking of activists, is that the amount of information is just mind-blowing, on both sides.
 
In Hong Kong, the situation is that from a single protest site you can have a couple of hundred people all filming and uploading material live and each is hours long. This is a problem for the way we think about open source investigations and we need to find an answer. Over-saturation of media is a kind of hyperesthesia on both sides. The government has traffic cameras and all the other sensors of the smart city that are now weaponized against the protest movement.
 
In Palestine, the viral emergency is used to set facts on the ground. Settlers are taking over archaeological sites that they always wanted to pray in and occupy and stake claims for, [and they can do it] because everyone else is locked down. Palestinian politicians dealing with the pandemic are arrested under the excuse that Israel should control the health situation, i.e. the sovereign is that which provides health care—only they don’t, and they don’t allow Palestinians to provide care for their own communities. Most seriously, the “unity government” that has been driven by the politics of the extreme right is using the pandemic to attempt to carry out the biggest land grab in the history of the occupation, the annexation of a huge part of the West Bank.
 
For a year or so we were working on migration, the borders of Europe—both across the Mediterranean and the land borders in Greece, the Aegean. All of a sudden, we are caught up in this double development: on the one hand, Turkey weaponizing migrants, pushing them toward Greece, and Greek police responding with lethal force against them and denying that they have done so. Under the guise of the pandemic, Greece is now deporting asylum seekers from its borders.

We also started to work on surveillance—digital surveillance and spyware—that a lot of our colleagues and partners were subject to, particularly Israeli spyware that targeted civil society investigators and activists. The companies manufacturing those cyber-technologies are now seeking to launder their reputation, and are marketing those technologies to states worldwide and presenting them as a solution to tracking the virus. 
 
We try to reconstruct the way in which an incident of hacking or cyber-attack works. For example in Mexico, with some of our partners there, one person is targeted and then their family, associates, others in the organization, then things start happening to you in the real world, and then it spreads. There is something viral about those targetings: that viral weapon is being reinvented as a solution to the virus. 
 
H: A kind of contact tracing.
 
E: Yes, exactly. I am interested in the way you have technologies that were experimented with at the frontiers of the so called “war on terror”—let’s say in Afghanistan, the Pakistan frontier—pattern recognition, signature strikes, the CIA when it conducted its targeted assassination campaign, the drone campaign in Pakistan. It didn’t always know who it was targeting, it was looking at the patterns and networks of connections. Let’s say you were going to a particular mosque or community center, driving along a particular road, making phone calls to a particular number, then the system would flag you as an imminent threat and the response would be lethal force, such as an extrajudicial execution. 
 
This means there is a combination of two modes of surveillance. One is what you’ve done: that’s signal surveillance—where you’ve been, who you’ve spoken to, where you’ve driven, etc., etc., and the pattern between those. The other is modeling, which is always about the future and asks what are the possible futures that could unfold out of that pattern? At that moment it is almost as if a deck of cards opens—possible futures that could unfold out of that detected pattern. That use of modeling is as a way of looking into the future and surveillance as establishing patterns on the basis of which you have this crystal ball, or something which is presented as if it is a crystal ball into the future, is what we are currently seeing. 

H: And this connects directly to the pandemic?

E: Surveilling the pandemic is always based based on both detection and on projections. Often pandemics are political metaphors for different things, whether it is racism after the Black Death, segregation, ghettoization. Or, it’s the segregation of the cities themselves and the way urban space is organized—the separation of buildings and neighborhoods, the increased control of the spaces between things. Whenever we look historically at a moment of pandemic or epidemic, it tends to become a kind of metaphor that enables political change targeting the poor, vulnerable communities, the migrants and the refugees. An enabling of tracing and surveillance.
 
We need to pay attention to the political imaginary that emerges from the medical necessity—and I completely understand the medical necessity. Sometimes I feel like we are poking in the dark. I’m between two mindsets: on the one hand, I just want to look and learn and understand the world as it is transforming and try to think “what will the world we are coming back to be like?” On the other, I think that we must keep on thinking and being vigilant and see that the metaphorization of the virus enables technologies that were invented before to be used in a different way.

H: I think many of us feel that life is being remade while we're distracted responding to the immediate challenges we all face in our different ways and to the intense inequalities that are so much a part of this. It’s clear there’s a lot of planning taking place to reorganize the world that's emerging from this situation. I agree with you it's a very challenging situation to be in, we’re bifurcating all the time. But I would think that with your focus on emergent technology you’re looking at this differently from the rest of us.
 
E: Imagine, all our ongoing investigations get inflected and changed through this new situation. We need to be able to respond to that. New tools of repression and new opportunities for repression emerge. We need to think on our feet and try different things. In particular, I'm concerned about that relation between surveillance and prediction. Surveillance, pattern recognition, and modeling the future. Where is that going? How is that going to get used? What are the dangers of the weaponization of that technology?
 
H: The modeling that we’re seeing is mostly medical and public health modeling. And it’s coming out of a particular understanding of what society is and how it should be organized. The options are highly constrained. Surveillance is integral to public health and justified through public health as well.
 
E: Yes, I’m concerned that public health is being used for political actions, political decision, perhaps justifiably, taken on the basis of surveillance and modeling. What is that going to mean for our future? How is politics going to inhabit that tool in a different way than simply containing the spread of the virus? 

Eyal Weizman is the founding director of Forensic Architecture and Professor of Spatial and Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London, where he founded the Centre for Research Architecture in 2005. The author of over fifteen books, he has conducted research and taught at many universities worldwide. He was Global Scholar at Princeton University and a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. He is a member of several managing and advisory boards, including the Technology Advisory Board of the International Criminal Court and the board of trustees of the Centre for Investigative Journalism. He is also a founding member of the architectural collective DAAR in Beit Sahour/Palestine. Eyal studied architecture at the Architectural Association, graduating in 1998. He received his PhD in 2006 from the London Consortium at Birkbeck, University of London.