Visual Culture and the Forensic: Culture, Memory, Ethics

Description

David Houston Jones builds a bridge between practices conventionally understood as forensic, such as crime scene investigation, and the broader field of activity which the forensic now designates, for example in performance and installation art as well as photography. Contemporary work in these areas responds both to forensic evidence, including crime scene photography, and to some of the assumptions underpinning its consumption. It asks how we look, and in whose name, foregrounding and scrutinising the enduring presence of voyeurism in visual media and instituting new forms of ethical engagement. Such work responds to the object-oriented culture associated with the forensic and offers a reassessment of the relationship of human voice and material evidence. It displays an enduring debt to the discursive model of testimony which has so far been insufficiently recognised, and which forms the basis for a new ethical understanding of the forensic. Jones's analysis brings this methodology to bear upon a strand of contemporary visual activity that has the power to significantly redefine our understandings of the production, analysis and deployment of evidence. Artists examined include Forensic Architecture, Simon Norfolk, Melanie Pullen, Angela Strassheim, John Gerrard, Julian Charrière, Trevor Paglen, Laura Poitras and Sophie Ristelhueber. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, visual culture, literary studies, modern languages, photography and critical theory. Cover Endorsements Half Title Series Page Title Page Copyright Page Dedication Contents Figures Acknowledgements Introduction Forensic Architecture The Forensic and the Witness Archive and Voice The Crime Scene: From Forensic to Counter-Forensic Notes 1. Staging the Scene of the Crime From High Fashion Crime Scenes to Landscapes with a Corpse Figure, Field and Ground Evidence and the Legal Archive The Quasi-Legal Archive: From Kathryn Smith's Incident Room to Jack in Johannesburg Notes 2. Forensic Landscapes From Elevage de poussière to Fait Faire corps avec le territoire: Ristelhueber's Landscapes Negative Pastoral: From Ristelhueber to Delahaye Luc Delahaye and the Photography of History Simon Norfolk and Chronotopia The Military Sublime: From Norfolk to Paglen Notes 3. Information Forensics Data Centres: The Technological Sublime Deadpan: From New Topographics to Lewis Baltz John Gerrard: Posthuman Deadpan Information Forensics and the Data Sublime Hacktivism and the Counter-Forensic Data Ephemera Notes 4. The Language of Things Julian Charrière: From Ancestrality to Future Fossils Hyperobjects and Blue Fossil Entropic Stories Simon Norfolk: From When I Am Laid in Earth to Shroud Pyrographs and Hypernominals An Invitation to Disappear and Ecological Dystopia Radioactive Utopia: From Polygon to Terminal Beach Notes 5. The Forensic Face From the Skull to the Face: Face Scripting Spirit Is a Bone: Non-Cooperative Images Fag Face, URME and Disidentification Trevor Paglen: Invisible Images and Machine Realism Notes Conclusion Notes Bibliography Index