Legal networks: visualising the violence of the law

Internet art that employs data visualisation techniques may be engaged with both in terms of the data used and also the interface to that data. Such an approach allows it to be understood as opening the possibility of an awareness of the contingency of the way any given community is constructed. The focus is shifted away from understanding data visualisation art as providing a transparent representation of reality. This is exemplified in the work They Rule which, approached in these terms, invites an engagement with the law’s role in enabling networks of powerful people to be constructed. They Rule opens the possibility of perceiving the law’s violence in the way that it asserts the authority of enabling and enforcing the existence of such connections. An awareness of the constructed nature of legal networks opens the law to the possibility of change by those it excludes.