The TRANSformacije Collection, vol. 51
Authors: Matthew Fuller, Eyal Weizman
Editor: Aleš Mendiževec
Translation: Sašo Furlan
Design and layout: Ajdin Bašić and Špela Razpotnik
Publisher: Maska Ljubljana
Investigative Aesthetics: Conflicts and Commons in the Politics of Truth
Investigative Aesthetics is a crossroads of the philosophy of aesthetics, media theory, and political activism. In it, Fuller and Weizman engage in a philosophical discussion on the foundations of perception and meaning-making, update it through new media theory, and situate it within the development of contemporary technology, thus shaping a new epistemology. Yet this is by no means an academic debate, for at its core it is politically oriented and serves the purpose of investigation. Investigation of what? Of traces of all kinds, even in the smallest of details. Traces of what? Inconsistencies with the official explanations of incidents, events, and narratives; traces that point to a different, problematic truth, one that escapes state or corporate power, which seeks to conceal it.
The TRANSformacije Collection, vol. 51
Authors: Matthew Fuller, Eyal Weizman
Editor: Aleš Mendiževec
Translation: Sašo Furlan
Design and layout: Ajdin Bašić and Špela Razpotnik
Publisher: Maska Ljubljana
Excerpt from the book
The investigative collective, through its capacity to incorporate a multiplicity of perspectives, poses a challenge to the traditional expert mode of inquiry that dominates both science and human rights research, where specialized arbiters of truth and fact travel from place to place, transmitting knowledge and delivering judgments. The necessity of such collective and dispersed truth-production arises from a political situation in which the object of dispute is not only the sources themselves, but also the interpretation of the real, where identities are formed around the production and interpretation of facts.
About the Authors
Matthew Fuller is a media theorist and professor at Goldsmiths, University of London, where he teaches in the fields of media theory and digital culture. His research brings together critical theory, philosophy of technology, software culture, and contemporary art. He is the author of numerous influential books, including Media Ecologies: Materialist Energies in Art and Technoculture, Software Studies: A Lexicon, and How to Sleep: The Art, Biology and Culture of Unconsciousness.
Eyal Weizman is the founder and director of Forensic Architecture – a research agency based at Goldsmiths, University of London, that develops, applies, and disseminates new techniques, methods, and concepts for investigating state and corporate violence. He also teaches spatial and visual cultures at Goldsmiths and is the author of several books, including Forensic Architecture: Violence at the Threshold of Detectability, Hollow Land, and The Least of All Possible Evils.