Joaquín Santuber: Artistic and Design Practices as Legal Knowledge Creation

This presentation, by Joaquín Santuber, explores possible formulations of how contemporary research through design and the arts can contribute to legal scholarship. As such, it adopts an epistemological stance toward these practices, treating them as bodily and materially grounded theorizing across disciplinary boundaries. First, it offers a brief argument that aesthetics is the common basis for law, design, and the arts, and therefore that law should be addressed as an aesthetic phenomenon. Second, it rehearses a formulation of how artistic and design practices can be valid forms of knowledge creation in legal theory grounded in three artistic projects addressing legal issues in international criminal justice, AI systems oversight, and housing evictions. The aim of this research is to initiate a line of inquiry into how contemporary artistic and design practices of making shape legal concepts and discourses by opening up possible materialities, meanings, and narratives related to law and justice.

The presentation is open to the Faculty of Law’s researchers.

Keywords: law, research through design and arts, aesthetics

Short bio: Joaquín Santuber is the Research Group Lead at metaverseLab, Johannes Kepler University of Linz, Austria, and Visiting Professor at the School of Design of the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. A lawyer with a PhD in Design and ITSystems, he addresses issues of law and technology through creative practices —arts and design