How Is Forensic Evidence Manipulated In A Post-Truth World? - Robert Trafford (Transcript)

Read the full transcript of Forensic Architecture’s assistant director Robert Trafford’s talk titled “How Is Forensic Evidence Manipulated In A Post-Truth World?” at TEDxDaltVila, June 28, 2025.

Robert Trafford: If I say the word forensics, what do you think of? I bet some of you right now are thinking of a white chalk outline of a body on the floor, detectives and people in white lab suits. And all around, there’s a police tape which reads, crime scene, do not cross. At Forensic Architecture, we’re detectives of a kind, but we don’t work for the police or for governments. We investigate them.

We’re the kind of detectives that aren’t usually allowed inside that crime scene. Instead, we’re outside with the rest of society. And we’re trying to peer over that cordon into that crime scene to figure out for ourselves what really happened. Why? Well, because sometimes what goes on inside that crime scene behind closed doors is itself part of the crime, the cover up.

And when that happens, society needs the tools and the means to investigate the investigators and get to the truth ourselves. So for the last twelve years at Goldsmiths University of London, led by our director, professor A. L. Weitzman, we’ve been trying to come up with some of those tools. We work all over the world from the post conflict truth commissions in Colombia and Guatemala to the Grenfell Tower fire in London to investigating neo Nazi political parties in Greece and US special forces in Cameroon.

We testified in courtrooms and parliamentary inquiries. We’ve submitted our findings to international legal processes and presented at the UN. We’ve also shared our findings with publics all around the world through dozens of major art art exhibitions. And wherever we work, we use digital three d models like these to reconstruct the scenes of human rights violations and acts of state violence by piecing together fragments of media evidence, videos, photographs, satellite images. Now for a time, we might have thought that that job was getting easier.

After all, since the smartphone and social media came into our lives, we’ve got more visual evidence in the world than ever before. But it’s in that same time period that we’ve witnessed the rise of post truth and seen fundamental ideas like the rule of law and human rights marginalized and outright ignored. And it’s that that I want to reflect on with you all today. How is it that the proliferation of visual evidence, quite literally infinitely more things caught on camera and available to all of us. How is it that that condition has made the truth of what’s going on in the world so often seem less clear rather than more?

ALSO READ: Barry Schwartz: What Role Does Luck Play In Your Life? (Transcript)

And what can we do about it? Well, I want to offer you a way of thinking about this problem which is born out of some of our recent gallery exhibitions and which is rooted in the history of the word forensics. But first, let’s go back to the early twenty tens, a time when the rise of smartphones and social media led to what was called in the fields of human rights and journalism, the open source revolution. Suddenly, virtually overnight, it felt. New free sources of data were everywhere.

We could use free satellite images to peer over the walls of military bases. We could follow spies through their Facebook profiles. It really was a new dawn for investigators like us. By now, it felt like the facts were already out there. We just brought new tools to combine them and make them visible.

But this extraordinary promise had a dark side, and we began to see that clearly during the early years of the Syrian civil war. The Syrian civil war was really the first major conflict of the social media era. For the first time in human history, information was pouring upwards out of active battlefields into the public domain, available completely unfiltered to anybody anywhere in the world at any time. All you needed was a Twitter account. And what was born there was the information environment that we know today, in which images travel around the world faster than their contents can be fully understood, and the events that they depict are as such distorted and disputed.

So one way to think of forensic architecture is as a set of tools for unpacking evidence of contested events, getting behind the propaganda to the truth. I want to show you briefly what that looks like in practice through our investigation of the killing, the renowned Palestinian American journalist, Shireen Abu Akleh. Shireen was shot and killed in May twenty twenty two in the Palestinian city of Jenin in the occupied West Bank while covering a raid by Israeli forces. Now in the aftermath of the shooting, Israeli authorities blamed Palestinian resistance fighters. They posted this video, which they said showed the fatal shots being fired.

But by comparing details in that video to satellite imagery of the local area, we and other groups were able to show that this wasn’t true. In fact, the video in question was filmed around three hundred meters away from where Shireen was killed. After that, Israeli authorities admitted that, yes, their soldier must have fired the fatal shot, but they insisted it had been an accident. Now as Amnesty International and others have widely reported, in the last twenty five years, Israel has been responsible for the deaths of more than one hundred and eighty journalists in Palestine and one hundred and fifty of those in the last eighteen months alone. And so working together with our collaborators, the Palestinian human rights group, Al Haqq, we felt compelled to explore this question further.

ALSO READ: Why We Can't Stop Eating Unhealthy Foods: Laura Schmidt (Transcript)

Was Shireen really killed by accident? Now our investigation began as so many of us do with videos like this one, which captured the moments after the shooting. You’ll see here how we reconstruct from those videos a precise three d digital model of the scene. Today, I wanna talk to you about just one detail of our investigation, and that’s this tree.

In a photograph taken after the shooting, you can see four impact marks, bullet holes in the tree.

Now our digital model allows us to take, this information and move from this photograph to rotate the scene within the digital model to look up the street toward where those bullets had come from. Israeli military vehicles captured in this photograph. Our model allows us to approach those vehicles to even go inside those military vehicles. And by doing so, we could see what would have looked like to her killer at that range. And further, by tracing lines from the tip of that soldier’s rifle to the marks in the tree and the wall behind Shireen and her colleague, we could show how every shot that that soldier fired was consistently at the height of their head and shoulders.

Now Israeli authorities never investigated the shooter. The soldier went free and remains free. Your news cycle and your news feed moved on. And it’s in this way that the human rights violators, the perpetrators of human rights violations today use the information environment of the social media age to their advantage. Well, as our work shows, what’s needed to get to the truth in cases like this is something altogether slower and more patient and more considered.

And it’s here that I want to come back to the history of the word forensics. Because today, we think of the word forensics to mean essentially police investigations. But the Latin origin of the word, forensics, meant something quite different. Forensics referred to the Roman Forum. The Roman Forum was the center of public life in the ancient city of Rome.

It was, if you like, the original marketplace of ideas where differing perspectives and opinions would come together in negotiation and argument, and new ideas would emerge as a result. And in that spirit, at Forensic Architecture, we think of truth as a social activity. It’s a social project. Truth is not something that comes to you fully formed through your phone. You shouldn’t expect that.

ALSO READ: Ray Dalio: How to Build a Company Where the Best Ideas Win (Transcript) |

Truth is something we do together, and it’s something we have to create together. Just as our digital models allow for multiple perspectives on the same incident, so we believe that truth emerges through the careful and open integration of multiple perspectives and disciplines, law, science, arts, human rights, in slow and careful dialogue. And after exhibitions all around the world from New York to Tokyo, Istanbul to Bogota, we’ve come to learn a great deal about how art spaces can be vital venues for exactly that kind of dialogue. They might even present a possible solution to our present post truth crisis. Think about the time that you spend in an art gallery.

Slow, careful, contextualized attention. Time to look once, move away, come back, and look again. In our exhibitions, our technical research is animated. It’s brought to life by the the words and accounts of survivors themselves. And those words are at the same time made stronger by our verifiable evidence and scientific expertise.

It’s a mutually supportive relationship and one which creates a very different kind of relation between facts and their audience. People come to our shows three, four, five times. They come back with their notebooks, with their friends, with their parents, and they’ll stay for hours. Now tell me, when’s the last time that you really spent hours with just one story from the world today? See if you feel what I feel.

Because when I stand in the audience at one of our exhibitions, and I see and I hear shared truths like these emerging all around me through the careful and open integration of multiple perspectives organized explicitly around the experience of survivors and witnesses who urgently need our care and our solidarity and our attention, I feel as if I’m witnessing the beginnings of a solution. Because at its heart and in its history, forensics is not a practice for states and for police and for militaries. It’s a communal practice. It’s a social practice of information sharing and knowledge production, and it’s thousands of years older than your smartphone. Now there are difficult days ahead for public truth and for human rights.

That much is clear. But if we can find our way back to that kind of knowledge, hold on to something like that kind of knowledge, I believe we might just have a chance. Thank you.

How Is Forensic Evidence Manipulated In A Post-Truth World? – Robert Trafford (Transcript)

Related Posts