It’s refreshing to note that Data sourcing and vizualization is making an impact in conflict zones. Here are a couple of very interesting points in this reading.
First, development of platforms that aggregate conflict zone data is making a significant impact in changing perceptions of war. Second, sources of data are vast; from mobile phones, satellites (which are not subject to sharing regulations) to physical “sensors” like trees, plants, floor or wall marks that record damage in conflict. Few people or research organizations are aggregating them to send a message, but it is meaningful and valuable work which is catching on.
Online platforms enable the user to explore all the data compiled in a database. For Weizman, it has allowed him to simplify a very big, complicated yet personal conflict to get a message across.
Notes for self during reading
* Company: Forensic Architecture
Mobile phone footage from ordinary people. Concept of testimony, reformatted, it's now becoming technological tesimonies.
* Standard architectural digital tools: telemetry, video-footage syncing and shadow clocks
* Telemetry: Telemetry is an automated communications process by which measurements are made and other data collected at remote or inaccessible points and transmitted to receiving equipment for monitoring.
* Video-footage synching: merging audio and video shot separately.
* Shadow clock: telling time by sun.
* Plume analysis: clouds of dust when bombs are dropped.
* 3D landscapes as a reconstructive memory chamber.
* Special case, prosecution (start to accountabilty).
* Beautiful perspective:
"A war starts; tens of thousands of foreign people enter into a familiar city that has hundreds of thousands of people in it and at that moment everything starts recording. People's memory records, the grass records, the trees record, the plumes in the air record, the concrete records. Everything is recording in a variable way. But these sensors are weak, fucked-up sensors. You need to develop ways of interpreting and reading and mediating those things."
* Online visualisation platforms enabling the user to explore all the data compiled in a database.