Middle East conflict | Genocide evidence with public data

The Gaza maps depict Israeli attack targets, including civilian infrastructure, farmland and aid distribution centers. Photo: Tom Mesic Data can help make the dimensions of war and destruction visible. The Forensic Architecture research group working at Goldsmith College at the University of London specializes in such investigations: They evaluate enormous amounts of video sources, satellite images and texts, verify them and supplement them with interviews from eyewitnesses. From October 2023 to November 2025, the researchers were able to document a total of 1,634 attacks by the Israeli military on primarily civilian targets in Gaza.

The installation, which has now been awarded the Golden Nica in the “Interactive Art+” category at the Prix Ars Electronica 2026 in Linz, consists of an interactive map of the Gaza Strip, which is projected large on the wall of the Lentos Art Museum. You can use a touchscreen to directly select individual attacks from a list. You will find out the time and place of the incident as well as a description of the destruction. Video footage showing the attack and the extent of the devastation is often included in the presentation - this is not for the faint of heart.

A second data preparation level allows a deeper analytical look. The Gaza map shows specific attack targets. You can get an idea of ​​how much arable land has been destroyed by looking at the blackness of once green areas. An increase in blue dots on the map indicates which civilian infrastructure has been destroyed.

You can go into the analysis in even more detail and display individually destroyed bakeries, restaurants or cafés as data points on the map. Attacks on relief supply distribution centers also take up a large part of the installation.

On the one hand, the digital color pigments in the representation ensure a rather cool, rational distance, combined with aesthetic appeal - similar to the abstract expressionism of the great American artist Jackson Pollock. At the same time, all the different colored data points and areas make the dimension of the war of aggression visible.

The integration of all this different information has become the hallmark of the Forensic Architecture platform, founded in 2010. “We definitely benefited from the open source revolution,” confessed Eyal Weizman, a trained architect and son of Jewish Holocaust survivors. Open source not only means the amount of freely available images and videos, but also programs for evaluation. »Our aim is to establish relationships between the images of individual events. "Together with information about location and time, we can determine the angle at which a bullet struck a building, as well as the physical positions of perpetrators and victims in space," Weizman explained in an interview with the British "Observer."

Another element is the relocations ordered by the Israeli military. They can also be tracked on the interactive map month after month, year after year. A frozen image of these expulsions is also captured on a large textile map - another artistic visualization element. These resettlement programs are also integrated into a chronological narrative of the destruction as a whole - starting with video footage of thousands of leaflets being dropped urging people to leave their homes. The air raids were preceded by the propaganda air war.

Forensic Architecture derives the accusation of genocide from all these different facets of the war. The group refers to the definition of the Polish-Jewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin, which was also adopted in Article 2 of the Genocide Convention. Genocide is characterized by a coordinated plan to destroy the essential livelihoods of national groups with the aim of exterminating these groups.

Forensic Architecture made the material, prepared in a report of more than 800 pages, available to the South African legal team that is accusing Israel of genocide in a lawsuit before the International Court of Justice. An earlier version of the report was sent to the British Parliament in an attempt to stop the supply of spare parts, especially for the F35 bombers, which are used extensively in the air war against Gaza. Data art clearly plays back into the political field here.

The project sparked controversy in Austria. The award ceremony fits perfectly into the critical, enlightening and very tech-savvy self-image of the Ars Electronica media art festival. However, Governor Thomas Stelzer from the ÖVP, who opened the festival, pointedly stayed away from the award ceremony. However, no pressure was put on the event or jury, a festival spokeswoman told “nd” when asked.

The »nd.Genossenschaft« belongs to the people who make it possible: our readers and authors. They are the ones who ensure left-wing journalism for everyone with their contribution: without profit maximization, media companies or tech billionaires.

→ report independently and critically → make topics visible that would otherwise go unnoticed → make voices heard that are often ignored → counter disinformation with facts → initiate and deepen left-wing debates

“Pay voluntarily” now and support the financing of our solidarity-based newspaper. So that nd remains.