Case study: The Evidence Chamber
The Evidence Chamber was FF’s first collaboration with the Leverhulme Research Centre for Forensic Science (LRCFS), at the University of Dundee. In an immersive experience, audiences make up a jury who must review documents and audio and video evidence to reach a verdict on a murder case which hinges on two types of forensic evidence: gait analysis and DNA.
The project came about after FF presented our original ‘jury show’, The Justice Syndicate, at National Theatre of Scotland and Galinskyworks’ festival Citizens of Nowhere in Dundee. We’d made The Justice Syndicate as an artwork, to explore how a group of strangers would make decisions. The jury set-up was just a way of credibly getting a group of people who didn’t know each other to talk about something serious. But LRCFS had heard about what we were doing and were interested in the jury set-up itself. While we were in Dundee, where we presented The Justice Syndicate in the Sheriff Court, we met with LRCFS’s director Professor Niamh Nic Daied and public engagement lead Dr Heather Doran - and they commissioned us to make The Evidence Chamber.
Heather and Niamh are hands down some of the best people working in this area. From the off, they were trusting and enthusiastic. They were also organised and used their convening power to get access to information and resources that we, as a bunch of artists, would never have got access to. They also saw the unique potential of what we’ve come to call our ‘Syndicate platform’. It offered a tool for public engagement and simultaneously a way of doing research.
During The Evidence Chamber, the audience watches ‘testimonies’ from characters involved and expert witnesses. Their decision-making process is supported by explanatory materials about forensic evidence, namely some comics that LRCFS had produced. The experience is structured to measure the impact of these materials: the bespoke control system logs anonymised data on each juror’s decision-making process, including before and after seeing the comics. The public’s responses to the presentations of expert witnesses within the case are logged and then used by LRCFS to develop scientists’ communication skills.
We opened the show in Dundee in October 2019, with plans for LRCFS to tour the experience in Spring 2020. Then the COVID-19 pandemic hit: there was no way that we could bring twelve strangers together in a small room to pore over evidence on ipads and discuss their verdict. So FF’s CTO Joe McAlister rebuilt the Syndicate platform so people could play online. In July and August 2020, members of the public from over 20 different countries took part in the sold-out run of 30 performances which was praised by the New York Times as ‘relentless innovation, a glimpse of the future of online performance’ and declared by No Proscenium to be ‘guilty of greatness’. Audience members were thrilled to be joined by Professor Niamh Nic Daied herself for the debrief section, when they were able to put all their questions and theories to a top expert.
The Evidence Chamber was shortlisted for a Times Higher Education Award. It was used as a training tool for High Sheriffs in England and, post-pandemic, for law and forensic science undergrads and at science festivals. The team presented the project at the National Co-ordinating Centre for Public Engagement’s Engage Conference, and published a paper on it in the journal Frontiers: The Evidence Chamber: Playful Science Communication and Research Through Digital Storytelling. Data from the first 30 performances of The Evidence Chamber was analysed to write a paper in Jcom: Can science comics aid lay audiences' comprehension of forensic science? The story was picked up by various publications, including Forbes magazine!
LRCFS was awarded a Gold Engage Watermark for Public Engagement by the National Co-ordinating Centre for Public Engagement (NCCPE), (which we think they very much deserve) for their work with forensic science and legal practitioners as well as citizens playing an active role in helping to improve the use and understanding of science in the justice system. FF and LRCFS have gone on to make two more projects together.
"It was truly a pleasure to work with the Fast Familiar team on The Evidence Chamber. This was a ground breaking piece of work helping us to understand how jurors view expert forensic evidence and has provided us with fantastic new insights and knowledge. We had enormous fun and would recommend them unreservedly as project partners."
Professor Niamh Nic Daeid, Leverhulme Research Centre for Forensic Science, University of Dundee