Surveillance technologies have grown increasingly into the very fabric of urban landscape across the globe. Sometimes these go unnoticed, sometimes they are veiled under the pretence of smart city developments that render the deep embedding of sensory technology into our immediate surroundings a false declared beacon of progress and interconnected life. Forensis and Forensic Architecture develop methods to critically scrutinise the violence of state, corporate and environmental actors. Using a wide array of digital tools and spatial reconstruction techniques we have turned our investigations towards surveillance technologies, documenting their abuse and embedding in regimes of occupational, colonial and state violence. The lecture and workshop will show both case specific examples of counter-surveillance work as well as illustrate the ways through which open-source investigative techniques, testimonial work, and spatial research methods can intersect to document, counter and resist ever more present surveillance.

About the lecturer

Tobechukwu Onwukeme. In May 2022, Tobechukwu Onwukeme received his Bachelor of Science(B.Sc) from the University of Utah’s Multi-Disciplinary Design School, where his undergraduate thesis proposed the confluence of computational, architectural, and material design tools in response to environmental violence against migratory wildlife in the Americas, Eastern Europe, and West Africa. The project won the program’s thesis prize. Prior to joining Forensis he worked at various labs and agencies as a design technologist where he designed and developed applications for computer vision, sensors, ML, data sonification, and material fabrication.

Jasper Julius Humpert is a multidisciplinary researcher and artist. At FA and Forensis, Jasper works in the editorial and investigative teams across various topics. Focusing on the interpretation of the overlap of the written and the seen, his research revolves around the investigation of state brutality, extrajudicial violence and regimes of environmental destruction. Jasper received an MSc at the School of Geography and the Environment at the University of Oxford, and completed his studies in Philosophy, Journalism and Visual Anthropology in universities of Maastricht, Netherlands, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil and London, United Kingdom. Prior to his work at FA, Jasper worked as a researcher and political organiser and activist in The Hague, Berlin and Rio de Janeiro.

About Forensic Architecture

Forensic Architecture (FA) is a research agency based at Goldsmiths, University of London. Our mandate is to develop, employ, and disseminate new techniques, methods, and concepts for investigating state and corporate violence. Our team includes architects, software developers, filmmakers, investigative journalists, scientists, and lawyers.

We are an interdisciplinary agency operating across human rights, journalism, architecture, art and aesthetics, academia and the law. In 2022, the Peabody Awards programme wrote that we had co-created ‘an entire new academic field and emergent media practice’; in 2024, the European Research Council assessed Forensic Architecture as ‘a scientific breakthrough (defined as a revolutionary work that led to deep change in existing paradigms or new methods opening a new stream of research)’.

Since 2020, FA has supported the growth of agencies worldwide that practice and apply our methods. The Investigative Commons is both a global network of practitioners, and a physical space in Berlin, within the offices of our sister agency Forensis.

All events take place in hybrid form (on site and via Webex). If you would like to attend on site, no registration is required. To attend the lecture online via Webex, please register here.

About the lecture series