Material witness : media, forensics, evidence / Susan Schuppli.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Schuppli, Susan, author.

Series:

Leonardo

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Evidence, Circumstantial.

Forensic sciences.

Evidence (Law).

Physical Description:

1 online resource (xv, 373 pages) : illustrations

Place of Publication:

Cambridge : The MIT Press, [2020]

Summary:

The evidential role of matter--when media records trace evidence of violence--explored through a series of cases drawn from Kosovo, Japan, Vietnam, and elsewhere. In this book, Susan Schuppli introduces a new operative concept: material witness, an exploration of the evidential role of matter as both registering external events and exposing the practices and procedures that enable matter to bear witness. Organized in the format of a trial, Material Witness moves through a series of cases that provide insight into the ways in which materials become contested agents of dispute around which stake holders gather. These cases include an extraordinary videotape documenting the massacre at Izbica, Kosovo, used as war crimes evidence against Slobodan Miloševic; the telephonic transmission of an iconic photograph of a South Vietnamese girl fleeing an accidental napalm attack; radioactive contamination discovered in Canada's coastal waters five years after the accident at Fukushima Daiichi; and the ecological media or "disaster film" produced by the Deep Water Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Each highlights the degree to which a rearrangement of matter exposes the contingency of witnessing, raising questions about what can be known in relationship to that which is seen or sensed, about who or what is able to bestow meaning onto things, and about whose stories will be heeded or dismissed. An artist-researcher, Schuppli offers an analysis that merges her creative sensibility with a forensic imagination rich in technical detail. Her goal is to relink the material world and its affordances with the aesthetic, the juridical, and the political.

Contents:

Opening statements

Discovery

Hostile witness

Hearsay

Motion to strike

Damages

Toxic tort

Cross-examination

Expert witness

Burden of proof

Failure to appear

Closing arguments

Convictions

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

OCLC-licensed vendor bibliographic record.

Other Format:

Print version: Schuppli, Susan. Material witness.

ISBN:

9780262357203

0262357208

9780262357197

0262357194

OCLC:

1130309740