COMPENSATORY INFRASTRUCTURES: Agencies and Think Tanks as Sites of Knowledge Production and Judgment Recommendation
Publication by Lisa Stuckey (with an artistic contribution by Karina Nimmerfall). Reader 6 in series of the Studio Art & Research, eds. Karina Nimmerfall and Maximiliane Baumgartner, Laboratory for Art and Reseach. Cologne: University of Cologne, 2023.
With images from Unintentional Monument (The Mattix Code), 2020–2022 by Karina Nimmerfall
Images by kunst-dokumentation.com
ABSTRACT. This paper addresses hybrid institutionalizations and is structured in five sections. Section I proposes the notion of the “compensatory infrastructures” that emerge during transitional justice processes and moments of disruption between politics, law, and the arts. Section II analyzes the rhetoricity and imagery of the think tank RAND Corporation (RAND) from a contemporary perspective in comparison to the research agency Forensic Architecture (FA). The epistemic architectures of RAND and FA are discussed as sites of knowledge production and judgment recommendations in section III. How consultation, decisionmaking, and judging may intersect is explored in section IV. By moving away from the casuistic level, section V suggests viewing think tanks and agencies, but also task forces and tribunals as intermediate actors that are able to “curate weak law.”
