 Okay, so again once again. Good morning to everyone. We are really sorry for the delay But as you know, this is the chaos communication Congress chaos is part of the show In any case we are ready to start our first speaker for the day. This is a talk that I'm personally very excited about Very interesting in my opinion. Our first speaker is an architect He's a professor of spatial and visual cultures and the director of a forensic architecture at Goldsmiths University In London, please give a big round of applause to A. L. O'Vitesman Congress actually and I I'm sure it's gonna bring good luck the fact that we had some technical equipment problem Right now. I'm running in London something that is better described as a counter forensic agency as a civil society Counter forensic agents no better way to explain what counter forensics is a certain turning around Repurposing off the forensic gaze towards the state Then looking at a series of issues where security forces or the police are the perpetrator So what I'm going to show you today Very fast are three cases the first one in Israel second one in Germany third one in Mexico each one involves violence or alleged violence by by the police and Each one also involves a different mode of research and Technique in doing so the first one is a place where I come from Israel Palestine and the issue is really the force eviction of Bedouin Bedouin communities that have been living in the north part of the Nakab or negative desert in the south of Israel Four generations now declared by the state To be illegally occupying those places and a subject to continuous raids By which the police. Oh, you don't see the slides Slides slide guys, okay, sorry one second All right, so I'll tell you a little bit more Forensic architecture until until they do so Basically what we are is a group of architects filmmakers some investigative journalists coders and We joined together to Create Forensic agencies it was a kind of an experiment that we started around 2010 Because we felt that Both technological and political Changes enabled and demanded the form of of counter forensics that we are Now practicing initially we were working in conflict zones the Towards or starting really in this millennium in the year 2000 War became an urban phenomena almost all conflicts that we were looking at took place in cities In and amongst buildings So in a very straightforward way just like a Medical doctor a physician can turn into a pathologist we architects We're turning the tools of our trade understanding of building a way of interpreting its Materiality its physicality Into an evidentiary technique. So initially what we were doing was a kind of archaeology archaeology of The very recent past or archaeology of the present. This is a term by Gilles Deleuze and Looking at piles of ruin Of a building that was destroyed in a bomb or in a firefight and trying to read from the Exposition of the rubble something about what has taken place within With it within and around it. So it was it started as a kind of an archaeological Practice but but then then again very often when we start working in conflict zones and the first projects we had were in Palestine and then in We were working To uncover drone warfare in the Pakistan Afghanistan frontier. We realized very fast Sorry Should I what the presentation on that stick so we can use this better. Oh, this is gonna take 20 minutes to pass them Really? Yeah, I Mean because I started to put it on a stick and Listen, is it can you connect this? I'm gonna do something else Can you if this if you can get an image from this? I'm just gonna run things from my website So so as I said the first level of our work was Archaeological material archaeology trying to uncover what has taken place where people wear But increasingly we realized that we cannot really get to the places where it was most important for us to research that That that states when they violate human rights or okay, okay. Thank you very much Often also due to things they close the area for To any Investigator any human right group or anyone that works to collect evidence against them and they limit the ability of Signal to come out of them. This is actually what happened in 2008 2009 Gaza very little signal Was coming out of Gaza under attack by Israeli forces And this is what happened when the at the beginning of the American drone strike campaign in Pakistan Afghanistan they were Effectively limiting it. So we what we had to do and this is what you're gonna start seeing is to undertake archaeology through looking at media and Interpreting really The kind of flood of social media images that were coming our way Okay, so the first the first example I would like to show you is Work we've done with a Palestinian human right organizational Misan and Amnesty in Gaza in 2014 We could not go we asked for permission to go to Gaza at the time We our access was denied and all we had was about 70,000 images that we have collected during that day and what we had to do really is tell a story of one day August 1st 2014 morning to two evening Which was the the most violent and the day where most Palestinian casual the casual teas were sustained What we didn't have was the metadata on those clips and images because of course they were harvested either for mainstream or social media and we Effectively had to develop a technique to look at the bomb clouds themselves to look at and compose the architecture of the bomb cloud plumes in order to see and Collect images that refer to the same explosion and back from there to determine the time and place of each one of those Bombs so those bomb clouds were for us the metadata. They were kind of like physical metadata Here is how we geolocate One of the images that that that we found or one of the clips that we found by comparing Points on the perspective of the Of the video with with what we see on on the satellite image Located the the place where the photographer was and by Cross-referencing three of those of the same cloud we managed to find the precise place where the bomb is finally landed so This is this is effectively a way in which you can reconstruct Metadata a time-space location From what we call physical clocks that is to say Analog things that exist Within within the image itself However, we could see other things on this photograph too If we if we look at one of those images here We have the videographer Capturing two shadow lines in this photograph just a second before Closing off the camera and what we need to do is to try to establish the time if we can establish the time on that Image and we know that form of the cloud is that time we can triangulate on and establish the The times of other videos and then and then move further So effectively by building a 3d model and running a sun simulation on it We could arrive at a very precise within five minutes margin of error time on that image and And now we know where this image where this video was taken And what time it is taken in There is however another in in the satellite image that we obtain this is a kind of a very rare occasion We saw an actual bomb On the satellite image again. This is something the satellite image has metadata And we started looking started hunting for that bomb in images from the ground again If we could locate that what we see in the in the top view on from a ground view We will be able to To to start establishing Times on the sequence as you see this sequence has metadata, but the metadata is wrongly set at around midnight so we compose that kind of panorama of Of the sort of the bomb clouds off of the city around around that time and And we could identify that cloud This is the cloud in Side view. This is it in top view We we could find a precise location of precise time and then By confirming that is actually the same we can move back and correct the digital metadata so this is all techniques of Of actually establishing the very basic foundational stone of of research time-space relations between events Here for example, we could see in two different corners of the of the web We find those images we can verify it's the same camera by seeing the same scratch on the lens Establish correct the metadata establish the time difference between them and now here here again the same camera man with the same scratch on the lens and now we can compose a timeline of bombs during that day and And after that, of course these kind of cloud atlases are a technique that was used by Artists and by amateur meteorologists all the way from the 19th century on What we did is creating that kind of archive of clouds, but here what you see is that we were able to Convert them to information on the ground and then invert the image move from cloud to city What you see here? The model is something that we call the architectural image complex Architectural models are the only ways to make sense and to place those multiple images in space time So that we can navigate rather than edit them we can navigate between one image and and the other What you've seen here is that on one of the images looking so carefully at the bomb club We start seeing two images in midfall. We found the craters where they have landed and We could for lawyers calculate the kind of like the destruction radius there you would see now again those Horrific thing to see a bomb Just split seconds before it land on the ground and would kill 16 Palestinian with an entire family But the lawyers ask for the size of that bomb in order to bring in a kind of a supply chain action on it When we see that on the on the photo frame we can locate the photo frame within a the model of the city and actually Measure those bombs in a very precise with a very small under 10% margin of error and then go to the catalog and find exactly which bomb it was that landed and That would enable activists to go after the manufacturer after the policy of of doing that so again here we are moving within the model with Thermodynamic specialists we look at the way the cloud is changing in order to Really realize we're looking at the same clouds. We're picking up now Images and events within the city as clouds being the anchors of the reconstruction And that that project has in fact gone later to as Evidence was submitted to the ICC to the International Criminal Court and was used in various other form of activism Underground and to certain extent might have contributed to a change of policy by the IDF about the Honeybell Directives is something that they've and acted during that day and The bomb cloud were also something that was very important were also like memory anchors the witnesses on the ground remembered and could sequence their movement according to those bomb clouds so think about an element that combines and ties together material evidence Media evidence and memory evidence at the same time So That's I don't even I'm basically just improvising. It's not at all the lecture. I wanted to show you Before here is a very recent investigation. We've undertaken in Cameroon and We're together again with with Amnesty International. We were able to expose a secret detention center in Run by the Cameroonian military that were Boko Haram Prisoners of suspects of Boko Haram prisoners were actually tortured We had access to people in Cameroonian prisons. It is very rare occasion. We were able to actually send questions back and forth and reconstruct the The architecture and of the prison and the conditions of incarceration But what we came very important through the questions that we continuously pose and continuously received from those suspects is that they've actually Seen And at the beginning we we did not know if this was Correct or not. They were obviously seeing people being tortured and killed outside of their detention center But at some point they also confirmed seeing something different American soldiers That were Present on the site now as you know, the US has claimed that it has stopped rendition and stop involvement in torture but This is something that We started very closely digging in to see whether we could find any traces of US soldiers and other European militaries Involved within that Sort of incarceration and torture of Boko Haram suspect first thing that we saw that we noticed was And sometimes traces are left in the most kind of Unexpected of places a contract an American contract to connect that base to the internet The minute that we saw that that was on the public domain. We started following on Facebook and Seeing some American soldiers actually forgot to disconnect the location tagging and you know They're kind of like holiday photographs Could be very Easily located on to the base again We've built a model of the base in order to confirm Precisely where each one of the photographs was taken and that we can see that they had access to the entire base again The base where people are executed tortured Etc and and then track the unit and and as you see the The site is actually under construction something that is We could not believe seeing was American soldiers training The unit that is doing those atrocities and here in this almost comical Film they train them in night vision equipment by playing football So they all play football in the dark with night vision And you could see that that the sort of the involvement is is very Very direct so that that the exposure of that base led to a sort of a full American At the beginning denial always denial Then admission then our full investigation by the by by the US about this These allegations Another Important case that we were involved with recently is the Iotzee Napa case. I think maybe many of you know the the story of The 43 students Mexican students that Were forcefully disappeared in Mexico We were asked by the parents And by other civil society group To in fact investigate that It's one of the biggest controversies in Mexico right now Still although it's three years since the disappearance students Involved in very Grassroot left-wing politics entered into a city that was very much involved in narcos trade and Were destroyed by the police the military and and and organized crime What we've done here is not really collect new evidence, but look at thousands and thousands of existing reports and Wanting in fact to data-mind them There were you know hundreds and thousands of documents and the only way to To make sense of them was actually to look at relations between different events in space time the relations between all phone calls Photographs movements of cars and gunshot Started creating a very different picture than the Mexican government is actually was willing to admit And that is that? There was some local gang or local sort of organized crime group that was in charge of Of these actions so we created a platform in which we placed every Named actor In space time a timeline and all the communication so that we could start seeing relation between evidence often It's not the a bit of evidence in itself. It's not the casing or gunshot that that matters but actually patterns coordination and patterns of escalations and other things that that actually expose what What was going on and we could show really a direct involvement between three different police forces And the the military and organized crime at the same time the location of all CCTV cameras that were there and removed and And and it's somehow the relationship between phone calls and and attacks became Most clear indication of command and control either today these events were actually coordinated by the police here We are analyzing CCTV Cameras and and what they would have seen of course the state Immediately after the event erased every CCTV camera that existed that was available In the city and they said all they didn't show anything we could show exactly what they would have shown at that at that moment another element to this is We go so this is the platform you can actually go and explore it yourself Rather than a sort of like a work with images as I said this is a work with data and one of the most important Drawing and in fact became one of the very influential drawing during that In our investigation was a kind of a working drawing that we kept for ourselves because we had to keep track of where every Agent was What was the relationship between them and also the multiple narratives that were told so we kind of kept a very very long drawing at the office Plotting the movement of different actors Until at some point we realize that what we were drawing that working drawing Became in in fact in fact an image of disappearance because disappearance is not about and force Disappearance of people is not only about grabbing people Killing them and hiding the bodies Disappearance is also an attack on evidence is the Continuous withdrawal and destruction of evidence. It is the introduction of false narratives and subterfuge so Disappearance is in fact a narrative form in itself and And so here that drawing we could actually kind of like show how The state narrative here in black. I'm not gonna go exactly into what everything means because we lost a lot of time in this Presentation, but these are the movement of of the students according to the state narrative a state narrative that is Still officially holding although it's being currently revised in response to Too many things but including also our our investigation and And now you would see that the victim the survivors narrative completely different Starts they they enter the city at a completely different time they move through it and And And The divergence between the black and the red narrative in fact is the space of denial and disappearance disappearance as as as an ongoing crime disappearance as a crime On narrative, etc. I'm gonna skip forward just that you can see how the The drawing is built up with another here on top the the purple Images are at the purple lines are those of the narcos and So each one tells a different story and the multiple stories are in fact the That that kind of space of disappearance here you would see these are movements of police throughout the city and You would see how that police force is precisely next to the students all throughout the attack and Moving along with them in fact what we have finally done And this is now green is the military Etc. Is is built that we knew about the The Opel Yeah Where is it? So this is this is the complete drawing that we've actually printed as an enormous mural in Mexico murals are kind of sites of political pedagogy you can think about Diego Riviera's great murals In Mexico in the US where their narratives about the history of the state and about the struggle of the working class in a certain sense We thought that this is a kind of a mural of the 20th century or 21st century if you like a kind of a data mural that is Complicated to read but its complication is in fact the image of disappearance these the entangled line and interruptions within it is what makes that space I'm Exhibition I want to show you the the image of that mural in the space and It has become ever since a kind of a site of political assembly and political activism of protest for the families and and others and And And it kind of shows for us the use of Cultural and art spaces in the context of our work Indexes another problem in counter forensic very often our evidence cannot enter the very official Spaces of state justice they cannot It's very rare that one can actually take the state Challenge the state legally in its own institutions what we need to establish our alternative forums and for us this could be Public spaces Exhibitions, etc. I think may some of you might know about the work that we've done on the NSU on the Temer or the for fast some shoots Agent that was suspected to be present in an internet cafe in castle during the time of a racist killing and us showing that He he was there. He could not have Missed they this this event that was presented in document and document are offered for us another very interesting forum that the fact it was Shown there has in fact mobilized the process including in the Federal in the federal German in the German federal investigation and also in the Hessin parliamentary investigation Where different delegations from these? from from from this parliamentary investigation actually came to the commander to see it and finally that work Was presented to Temer He was forced to look at it and to comment upon it. I think I should probably leave some time to question. I'm sorry about the chaotic Presentation, but I guess this is the nature of this of this event So I'm happy to have had at least a chance to present to you some some work. Thanks for listening So thank you for a very interesting talk despite all the difficulties No, but if you have any questions, then there are four microphones here in the center aisle and two on the side And you can line up and ask your questions and first question number a microphone number one How much has any official state tried to shut down your investigations? Well, this is Shutdown is a kind of is a complicated term first of all We face interruptions initially in not being allowed access to sites And this is very much the question in the West Bank and Gaza Our investigators when they land in Tel Aviv airport sometimes are interrogated sometimes that turned turn around Nothing of that is is Comparable to what the Israeli state would have done if these were Palestinians are trying to to do the same thing So to a certain extent Me being an Israeli Jew I'm privileged by the By the state and the attempt is to use those privileges To undo those privileges to certain extent We continuously had Interruptions from the FBI for example when we did the white phosphorus research on that included work on They are attacking Fallujah Iraq with white phosphorus We had some of our collaborators in the US's home being raided We have you know, we kind of like being trolled and threatened but It's it's a kind of a continuous sort of dance of us being to kind of protect our stuff protect our data and Attempts to penetrate it attempts to smear us on the public domain and Few very little victories sometimes Okay, actually it's the same question because Our aim is to develop new evidentiary techniques So we kind of never do the same investigation twice or we'd never use the same methodologies twice What do we do after we develop any software that we put it on a on the public domain we we put it as an open source code and We or if it is kind of techniques are more architectural or editing image-based techniques We we have academies we teach Activists how to do it. So we try whenever we work with partners on the ground to leave capacity behind us and that is also The reason what enables this to us is that we are sustained on research grounds rather than Only on commissions, although, you know, I mean if if a Prosecutor human right group or any other civil society group would like to commission us we would They they they would pay for part of the investigation, but the large part of it is actually research grounds that translated into open source stuff and and and the The investigations are being put on a public domain It's kind of when you look at our videos They're a little bit like cooking programs because they both tell you what we find and they tell you exactly how to do it It's kind of take you step by step. This is what you do here Then that then this etc etc Like the phone number We in fact we are now about 15 architects coders and and and filmmakers and we are recruiting because we're growing we and I will stay here for the day. So anyone that wants to come and work with us in London or remotely I'll be delighted to speak to you In this We started doing now photogrammetry as as as 3d reconstruction from Existing open source images. So imagine, you know a place in Syria Let's say that has been photographed or videoed for by many users We were able we are able to reconstruct it. In fact, this is one of the techniques We use in order to identify the gas attack on Han Shachdoun in in Syria by the regime forces Reconstructing precisely to the millimeter the shape of the crater and and we were able to Reconstruct from it the level of explosives, etc. That and that they were fitting only that particular rocket We don't really work together with companies. We try to take existing Softwares and kind of like adjust them to our to our aim But initially what I want to leave you with is the kind of the question of why architecture why architecture is really important here At the situation in a situation when you don't have only like two images of a scene That's a police brutality or an attack on the city, etc. But you have 70,000 and you need to Cross-reference them and you need to place them within a space The only way to do it is in architectural models Architecture is like the optical device that allows us to sync up and locate You know those cameras that are in space and moving in space. So It is really the kind of the the necessity of work of architects filmmakers and coders is fundamental Because space Replaces the kind of modernist montage as a relation to images Montages the edits in the film that is kind of you know the basic of cinema of political cinema The dialectic montage if you like your splice film and put it together that makes no sense for us because we need to Move within space pick up one film not to cut it We never cut the films that we are we just leave them within the model in their full duration But the investigator can move and navigate in space and time between them And as I showed you in the Mexico case, you know, these are like tens and tens of thousands of data points that Create kind of intersections between data image and architecture that where the story starts to be The unto to unfold at all So, yeah More questions Yeah, this is a really good question we The the work to sync up those 70,000 images from Gaza where took us a year think about it a year We're working a year on one day That's about the right kind of ratio in forensic time that we are that we operating within it What protects people during war and during when they'll do it will never place their location but months after the conflict It was deemed By our partners in Palestine and by our partners in Amnesty that this is safe To do without going back to each source and and in fact asking them. We would never do it in real time though For Yes No, we work a lot with Bellingcat and Elliot I mean some some of our projects are together I guess that our The difference is not We engage more in sort of Big environment and kind of like data analysis from many sort of data points where architecture Architectural models are the kind of the arena that holds and cross-reference all those Images together the overlapping our work really is a kind of image identification What do we see where the image is located etc and And and on these issues we work with them together We tend to work more Against states western states militaries Holding them to account we feel is is that these techniques are actually much more useful Directed at the British American Israeli militaries and that we are able also to draw responses that are Effective in in these fields and I guess Bellingcat has slightly different sort of Field in which they work Okay, I think with that that will be your life question show again a big round of applause to a alpha great talk