NEW YORK (NYT NEWS SERVICE ).- Over the last decade Eyal Weizman and his colleagues within the London-based investigative group Forensic Architecture have examined violent occurrences around the world, often using video and architectural rendering software in efforts to parse confusing and often murky events.

Last week Weizman confronted an unexpected mystery when he was denied a visa to enter the United States. An official at the U.S. Embassy in London told him, without elaboration, he said, that an algorithm had identified a security threat that was related to him.

Weizman, who holds British and Israeli passports, had gone to the embassy on Feb. 14 in the hope of obtaining a visa so he could attend an art exhibition at Miami Dade College’s Museum of Art and Design at detailing Forensic Architecture’s work.

The State Department, which has described its screening processes as important to national security, said it could not comment on Weizman’s account. “Visa records are confidential under U.S. law; therefore, we cannot discuss the details of individual visa cases,” the agency said in a statement.

Weizman said in an interview that he has visited the United States dozens of times, most recently in December. He said the embassy visit had been jarring, in part because an official asked him to provide information about his travel over the last 15 years including who had paid for it and questioned him specifically about whether he had been to Syria, Iran, Iraq, Yemen, or Somalia.

He was also asked, he said, to name anyone he knew who may have triggered the algorithm, so that Department of Homeland Security investigators could more quickly assess his case. Weizman declined to answer the questions, he said, and remained in London.

“You would be putting people at risk by reporting their names,” Weizman said. “This is something we should not be asked to do as human rights investigators.”

On Wednesday night, at the exhibition’s opening in Miami, his wife, Ines Weizman, presented a statement he had written that said in part: “I am alarmed that relations among our colleagues, stakeholders, and staff are being targeted by the U.S. government as security threats.”

The statement also said that immigration officials had questioned Ines Weizman for more than two hours when she flew into New York last week. Responding to requests for comment from the Department of Homeland Security, a spokesman for U.S. Customs and Border Protection said in an email that as part of security efforts, officers may refer people for additional screening based on factors that could include a combination of an individual’s activities, associations, and travel patterns.

Eyal Weizman said that the embassy official had told him that the threat that surfaced could be related to something he was involved in, people he had been in contact with, places he had visited, hotels at which he had stayed, or a pattern of relations among those.

Forensic Architecture, which Weizman founded in 2010, is based at Goldsmiths, University of London. The group has investigated the fatal shooting of a Palestinian teenager by an Israeli border guard, assembled evidence of a Russian military presence in eastern Ukraine and produced an interactive cartographic web platform showing U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan.

Last year The New York Times worked with Forensic Architecture while producing an Emmy Award-winning project called “One Building, One Bomb,” which reconstructed a chemical attack by Syrian government forces on civilians.

Also last year a Forensic Architecture video, “Triple Chaser,” which examined the use of tear gas manufactured by an American company, Safariland Group, was included in the Whitney Biennial.

Laura Poitras, whose Praxis Films collaborated on that video, said she admired Forensic Architecture’s rigorous and multidisciplinary methodology, which often combines open source data, like video, with architectural models of buildings and landscapes.

“Forensic Architecture is doing completely innovative work,” she said. “It’s evidentiary and fact-based and oftentimes counters what a government is saying.”

For years, during both Democratic and Republican administrations, the United States has declined to issue visas to certain people.

In 2011, for instance, Kerim Yildiz, a human rights advocate for the Kurdish people, waited more than a year for a visa to enter the United States from London. Last year Omar Barghouti, a co-founder of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement, also known as BDS, which encourages economic pressure on Israel over its treatment of Palestinians, was barred from entering the country.

The American Civil Liberties Union has long criticized “ideological exclusion,” which it says keeps Americans from meeting with foreign speakers whose opinions the government dislikes.

Weizman said that in addition to attending the opening in Miami he had planned to meet with people to discuss investigating a facility in Homestead, Florida, that is used to house detained migrant children.

Now, Weizman said, he may have another topic to examine.

“Associative algorithms, triangulating algorithms, that look at patterns that look at relations between actions and movement, between people and places,” he said. “We need to gear up to be able identify and monitor those.”

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