This article critically engages with the emerging “media forensic” turn at the intersection of visual culture, new media practice, and humanitarian and political activism. This field purports to subvert dominant forensic and surveillant regimes, weaponizing these mediated modalities to document acts of humanitarian and political violence. Such practices have been widely celebrated for enhancing forms of legal and political accountability and justice. However, there are concerns that these practices may inadvertently mirror the state-sanctioned regimes of control and power they wish to expose, reinforcing settler-colonial histories of the forensic and evidentiary, whilst also excluding counter-hegemonic and experimental modes of emergent media investigation. To address these limitations, this article proposes a radical counter-history and praxis of the forensic, drawing on Indigenous epistemologies and critical decolonial thought. Analysing the work of the Indigenous media collective the New Red Order (NRO), the article argues that their ongoing Culture Capture project (2017–) exemplifies a counter-hegemonic mode of emergent media forensic practice. By asserting Indigenous epistemological agency over such modes of media investigation, the NRO challenges Western forensic practices’ hegemony. The article advocates for expanding the scope of media forensic work to include diverse publics, communities, and aesthetic-political practices that offer subversive, decolonial forms of evidentiary practice.
Articles by Patrick Brian Smith
Patrick Brian Smith is an Assistant Professor and University Fellow in the School of Arts, Media, and Creative Technology at the University of Salford. His research addresses how evidence is mediated, and critically explores the associated opportunities for both harm and repair. He completed his PhD in Film and Moving Image Studies at Concordia University in 2020 and was previously a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Warwick. He is currently working on a project entitled Counter Evidentiary Futures.