Investigative Aesthetics: Conflicts and Commons in the Politics of Truth

Description

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".

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.

The most astonishing book on architecture that I have read in years. -- Edwin Heathcote, Financial Times * [for Hollow Land] * A masterpiece of political analysis. -- James Ron, The Nation * [for Hollow Land] * Weizman boldly attempts to create an entirely new method to conceptualize the relationship between surfaces, movement, and the tools of war -- Achille Mbembe * [for Hollow Land] * Eyal Weizman's work has become an indispensable source of both insight and guidance in these difficult times -- Paul Gilroy Weizman continues to offer daring social and political commentary, questioning taken-for-granted structures and processes that perpetuate oppression and violence -- Legacy Russell, BOMB Magazine * [For The Least of All Possible Evils] * A fascinating treatise on how our political world functions today and how we might seek to interrupt it. -- Jack Smurthwaite * Art Monthly * Expansive ... [Fuller and Weizman] explore sense and sense-making in its fullest political terms: understanding the systemic forces of capitalism as well as an individual's sense of morality. -- Chris Hayes * Tribune * Sharp ... [Investigative Aesthetics] is invaluable as a hyper-aesthetic object itself. -- Michael Eby * Los Angeles Review of Books * Aesthetics is a battleground, a contested space; Investigative Aesthetics is part battle-plan or tactical guide and, more fundamentally, part user's manual for surviving this beautiful and terrifying world. -- Mark Rappolt * ArtReview * An undeviating announcement of the subversive potential of contemporary aesthetic practices. -- Lawrence Abu Hamdan * The White Review, Books of the Year 2021 *