 Today when conflict is urban there is an enormous amount of and very different type of evidence that we have access to. Some of them are language testimonies of people. We can speak to people, they can upload material online. Others are a little bit less traditional but I think we know now that we feel the enormous amount of images and data that conflict especially conflict happening in cities produce. This require this enable us to create accountability when we are not able to actually reach the ground but the problem of open source investigation is collecting that material verifying it, seeing that those videos are genuine and that they are from the area where we think we are and then synchronizing them in a way that can tell a story. So what you see here behind me is a kind of perhaps less than five percent of the images that forensic architecture collected of a single day of war in Gaza in the summer of 2014 the Israeli army invaded Gaza. August 1st was the one day of this war where most civilian casualties were sustained and Amnesty International the organization that actually commissioned us to do it was unable to enter the Israeli government banned the entry into Gaza. So we started collecting and receiving material from many people on the ground but sometimes the amount of material does not equal clarity in some images we see tanks firing in others we see buildings getting hit by shell we see civilians running we see bomb clouds etc how to compose and to create a narrative from all these the wealth of this material. The biggest problem is that of metadata when you collect material from open sources they come without the metadata which mainly for our purpose is the space and time in which those images were taken so we need to find other ways to do it we need to find what we call physical clocks within those images it would allow us to understand what time they were taken. One of the techniques in which art historians were always trying to establish the time location on images was meteorology looking at clouds and here adopting that technique we decided to look at bomb clouds understanding that each one of them has a unique signature in time and space we are able therefore to collect clips from different parts of our archive and to synchronize them by seeing the precise development of each cloud I showed you three but we allow to sync up hundreds of those videos simply by looking at the sky above but you need an anchor and anchor could be provided by satellite imagery imagery there was one satellite imagery of that day of August 1st it was taken at 11.39 in the morning and by chance it captured a bomb cloud just as it was exploding we spent days looking for precisely that cloud and found it on the ground here and had to verify precisely its dimension and location when we are content that this is the one we're able to time that image and then via triangulation the rest of the images of the battlefield so in fact looking at the development of bomb cloud in the sky allowed us to create a narrative and to create a timeline of that day and to start seeing what is happening to civilians on the ground I mean you would see how the timeline actually develops how those synchronizations would happen this is done manually but now we have systems and techniques to use machine learning and artificial intelligence to actually accelerate our work that always has a human dimension to it then we need to verify where those images are this is a photograph taken from near a hospital in Rafa and we see a bomb landing very closely we know it is there because we can match the image within our model the model becomes a way of navigation through the space looking at the cloud so closely we start noticing other things in fact we start noticing bombs in midfall splits of a second before they hit the ground and in this particular occasion killed according to Amnesty's researchers 16 civilians Amnesty lawyers asked us to see if we could actually tell which bomb it is and who is the manufacturer we could freeze those in mid air build the dimension of the photograph into the model measure the photograph put a grid behind them measure those bombs split of a second before they come and find out exactly what ammunition was used and that enables further legal work or corporate accountability work so forensic architecture is almost like a pathology of a building and in a sense it is a kind of skill that had to emerge why buildings because wars most conflicts right now take place in urban areas and when they do take place in urban areas buildings are the targets and when they are the targets analyzing buildings analyzing the rubble allow us to be something like perhaps archaeologist of the present and of course architecture is also the medium that allow us to look synchronize and locate the images in space I personally maybe you hear from my accent grew up in Israel and was very much involved in the around 2000 the year 2000 in activism and human rights work concerned with Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank and Gaza all those buildings that you see here might look like nice suburbs but they're actually violation of international treaties and human rights in fact these are kind of architectural crimes happening on the drawing board and analyzing them and analyzing the relation to Palestinian built fabric became very important in that work a big part of that research relied on drawing what was at the time the first map of settlements in the occupied territories these are in blue marked in blue here on that map the area in lighter blue are the areas of their expansion and what you see in lighter brown are the areas left for Palestinian semi-autonomous areas around you see that the problem is a problem of form and formal analysis becomes incredibly important here we're responding at a time to the call of a great Palestinian scholar called Edward Said who called for counter cartography he said cartography is usually the tool of the dominator it is the tool of the colonists it's the tool of the imperial powers in the since the 17th century onwards counter cartography is a way of inverting that cartographic gaze somehow the development of satellite imagery and the social media imagery that I showed you before has made made it necessary for us to turn counter cartography into counter forensics use forensic tools really to investigate alleged state crimes and human rights violation but sometimes we don't have images or perhaps only a satellite image this is the Syrian prison of Said Naya run by the Assad government it is one of the most notorious detention center when different human rights groups confirmed death in custody executions and torture are happening there and we wanted to reconstruct that prison but there were no images no reporting organization was allowed in and there was no journalism inside we know that memory has a spatial dimension to it we know that we recollect things when we return to places where they have happened but sometimes you cannot take survivors back to the scene of the crime it's simply impossible to do also survivors memory is a complicated thing survivors are usually traumatized and trauma does strange things to memory sometimes blackouts repetition it stretches spaces and time in unpredictable way together with forensic psychologists we have developed an entire methodology of interviewing survivors within 3d environments we would build with them 3d models and the process would evolve through a feedback loop and the model will be built through what they can describe to us and the memory would be rebuilt by being placed in those in those spaces the problem in Said Naya was that they were that most prisoners were led blindfolded into the prison they haven't seen it we had to work with acoustic engineers here with Lawrence Abu Hamdan in order to give our model sound properties reverberation and echo modeling and through that we could approximate the spaces locations and distances that we later corroborated with the satellite imagery and others I'm going to show you two short clips and how how it works when one models architecturally sometimes very mundane things and a traumatic memory might emerge here the Palestinian architect on our team Hania Jamal asks the detainee to model the hatch on his solitary confinement room he tells that the hatch is a bit bigger than his face he relates the size or dimension of his body with architectural ones and and then she asks what has happened and apparently the story that he has not told on normal interviews kind of sprang up where he was in the solitary confinement cell and the guard on the other side wanted to punish him ask him to push his head through that hatch and then his head was kicked and stamped upon on the other side he fainted and but but you could see that that most traumatic memory needed a very technical sometimes architectural question to emerge what we then we we placed that online in a kind of an interactive environment where people could actually experience some of those testimonies we managed to reconstruct the architecture of the prison for sound and and memory you could navigate through it go to the cell and listen to a testimony it was one of the very much viewed human rights report and it led Assad to be questioned on it and this is what he had to say the report that you mentioned you have mentioned it was a report made by Qatar and financed by Qatar you don't know the source you don't know the names of those victims nothing verified about that report it was paid by Qatar directly in order to vilify and smear the Syrian government in the Syrian army there are a lot of eyewitness no one who knows who are they you don't have anything clear about that it's not verified so no if we were indeed offered Qatari money I don't know we might have a dilemma but we were never offered that and in fact what is interesting in it is that you see that in human rights work or in counter forensic work increasingly people go look for who who is your funder we are funded by the ERC and European Research Council grant we funded by human rights and technology grants we funded sometimes by commissions from our client such as human rights watch or MNST but indeed all those donors do not exercise authority over our fines or our methods but increasingly we find that people try to use a certain relativism as camouflaged as kind of like healthy skepticism in a sense in the principle of post-truth is precisely that there's a kind of a new propaganda around now unlike the propaganda of old is not trying to convince us of this ideology versus the other but trying indeed to create a perceptual blurring by which we would not know anymore what is true and what is not and therefore verification becomes an incredibly important and arduous process verification is a process that must take place not only technologically but must build a diagram and a relation of institutions and experts people on the ground that suffer violence those that film and record it those that write about it the human rights organization that are sent to to write report about it university research centers like us that are able to contribute technologically to it and perhaps the media that could amplify our voice these are the kind of the network that are absolutely essential for us of maintaining truth at at this moment in time when truth becomes such a precious commodity I wanted to show just a very last sequence here about American involvement or us involvement rather in a military base in Cameroon the Salak military base where again reports of torture and execution have taken place the American military said they do not know anything about it they have no access to those places and we know that Facebook Facebook is spying on us but it also could be a good resource to counter and look at violations of others we build a model in order to match the Facebook photographs of an American service personnel simply forgot to switch off his location manager and we can see exactly where this person was because we can match it within the model and we can see that that person has an access right into the military base we could see American service personnel training Cameroonian soldiers in vat night vision equipment and we can see a film that could almost be comical if it would not be so sad of American military personnel in Cameroonian one playing football with night goggles equipment bumping into the building where detainees are held and questioned and tortured according to again amnesty here so these are the places where American service personnel were seen these are the areas where we know from the photograph where they were these are the detention cells where people died in custody also and this is where they are tortured and I think that these kind of superimposition make it make our cases strong amplify those testimonies of detainees and allow us to actually present solid cases that open in that case a full American african investigation thank you for listening