Thursday, February 18, 2021; 12pm PST
40 minute talk followed by 30 minutes of public conversation broadcast live at thelab.org
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In his talk, titled Forensic Architecture: The Long Duration of a Split Second, Weizman presents the group’s recent works and delves more deeply into the themes of police violence and artificial intelligence.

Forensic Architecture (FA) is an interdisciplinary group of artists, architects, filmmakers, investigative journalists, scientists, software developers and lawyers operating as a research agency led by Israeli-British architect Eyal Weizman. Founded in 2010 as part of the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths, University of London, the agency investigates contemporary political conflicts, police violence and human rights violations with and on behalf of the communities affected, international prosecutors, environmental justice groups, and media organizations. The results of their work are presented in international courtrooms, citizens’ tribunals and parliamentary inquiries, as well as in exhibitions, publications, keynote lectures and seminars. All these forums are used to reflect on contemporary forms of violence in the political and cultural context of our times.

The work of these investigators has been presented at international art and architecture exhibitions. For their recent project, a video produced for the 2019 Whitney Biennal, FA developed a machine learning algorithm to automate the detection of Triple-Chaser tear gas grenade manufactured by Defense Technology, a subsidiary of the Safariland Group. By analyzing online photos and images from civilian cameras, the algorithm was able to detect and locate the use of this grenade in countries in North and South America, the Middle East and North Africa.

Eyal Weizman is the founding director of Forensic Architecture and Professor of Spatial and Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London. The author of over 15 books, he has held positions in many universities worldwide including Princeton, ETH Zurich and the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. He is a member of the Technology Advisory Board of the International Criminal Court and the the Centre for Investigative Journalism. In 2019 he was elected life fellow of the British Academy and appointed Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) in the 2020 New Year Honours for services to architecture. Eyal studied architecture at the Architectural Association, graduating in 1998. He received his PhD in 2006 from the London Consortium at Birkbeck, University of London.

The Forum is an experiment in creating discourse within the context of isolation. Art creates a space for reconsidering our knowledge across various social and professional fields. It asks us: Why do we perceive things the way we do? What are we living for? How can we reimagine our relationships to the human and non-human world? The Forum proposes that the project of freedom is a project of making a world with others. So, we invite you to help us answer: what can we do now?

Please bring your ideas, proposals, questions to discuss following the talk.

Co-presented by Pro Arts Gallery & COMMONS

Thursday, February 11, 2021; 6pm PST
40 minute panel followed by 30 minutes of public conversation broadcast live at the lab.org
RSVP HERE FOR ZOOM LINK

Terrain: Art & Crisis in Downtown Oakland, a new standalone print publication, features Oakland artists who responded to the interlocking crises of 2020 with mutual aid, public art, and a commitment to principled, collective struggle against racial capitalism. Published by Pro Arts Gallery & COMMONS, Terrain includes essays, manifestos, design, interviews, and criticism seeded during a year of privation and unrest in and around downtown Oakland and Lake Merritt.

This installment of Forum features five Terrain contributors in conversation: alex cruse, whose “Towards a Back Loop at the End of the Worlds” locates local protests and a weed-ridden Oakland police herb garden in the “back loop” of resilience ecology; Julian Francis Park, whose “Catastrophic, Everyday, Confrontational — Mutual Aid” uses local examples to clarify the differences between social-reproductive solidarity, charity, and anti-oppressive mutual aid; Tara Marsden of Moments Cooperative & Community Space, which describes prefigurative excavation and collectivity in “When the Walls Are Torn Down;” Dio Brooks, whose conversation with codesigner June Little Soldier and printer Mollie Underwood appears in the publication as an insert; and editor Sam Lefebvre, whose “Plywood & Paint” examines the groundswell of protest murals as counterinsurgent artwashing underwritten by landlords.

Terrain, a 44-page publication perfect-bound and risograph printed in an edition of 200, and available now for presale, was developed through Lefebvre’s writer residency at Pro Arts Gallery & COMMONS. Other individual and collective contributors include Queers United in Community Care, We Are the Ones We’ve Been Waiting For, Phillip Greenlief and Brian Bartz.

The Forum is an experiment in creating discourse within the context of isolation. Art creates a space for reconsidering our knowledge across various social and professional fields. It asks us: Why do we perceive things the way we do? What are we living for? How can we reimagine our relationships to the human and non-human world? The Forum proposes that the project of freedom is a project of making a world with others. So, we invite you to help us answer: what can we do now?

Please bring your ideas, proposals, questions to discuss following the talk.

Thursday, February 4, 2021; 5pm PST
40 minute talk followed by 30 minutes of public conversation broadcast live at thelab.org
RSVP HERE FOR ZOOM LINK

Luis Camnitzer challenges convention and confronts institutional power, economic injustice, and political repression. A prolific artist, theorist and educator, and a prominent force in Latin American Conceptualism, his work springs from a relentless curiosity and a belief that art is a platform for acquiring new knowledge. In light of the potential closure of the 150-year-old San Francisco Art Institute, Camnitzer and The Lab’s director Dena Beard discuss his radical engagement with art education and its institutions, from his student days in Uruguay and move to New York in 1964 to his current work and writings.

As an art student in Uruguay in 1960, Camnitzer was part of a collective of artists, students, and educators who reformed the School of Fine Arts in Montevideo. Today, he is still an ethical anarchist preoccupied with the role of education in redistributing power in society. “If we keep digging,” he writes, “it becomes clear that these ideas existed way before us, will persist long after we are gone, and will do so regardless of who speaks or writes of them... The important question is whether they will ever be absorbed.”

The Forum is an experiment in creating discourse within the context of isolation. Art creates a space for reconsidering our knowledge across various social and professional fields. It asks us: Why do we perceive things the way we do? What are we living for? How can we reimagine our relationships to the human and non-human world? The Forum proposes that the project of freedom is a project of making a world with others. So, we invite you to help us answer: what can we do now?

Please bring your ideas, proposals, questions to discuss following the talk.

Image: “The Museum is a School; the artists learns to communicate; the public learns to make connections.”, 2011. © by Luis Camnitzer.