International criminal tribunals address the greatest atrocities of war and peace. They also, in practice, devote tremendous attention to the minutiae of technical operations, from the editing capabilities of Nokia cellphones to the growth patterns of Lombardy poplars. Susan Schuppli, in her masterful and engaging book, Material Witness: Media, Forensics, Evidence, encourages us to be receptive to the way materials, from radioactive particles to radio waves, can be enlisted to testify—to speak on their own behalf—and to what they tell us about aesthetics, representation, power, politics, and law.
Schuppli, a veteran of the renowned spatial research agency, Forensic Architecture, and reader and director of the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths University of London, draws out her “new operative concept—material witness” (3)—in a series of doublings, dichotomies, and double meanings. Her material witnesses—both materially relevant to a legal proceeding and themselves constituted of material—“operate as double agents,”...
