Symposium on Open Source Investigation Labs: The Aesthetic Language of Open Source Investigations: The Image of Truth and the Demand for Action

[Dr. Imar de Vries is a media scholar at Utrecht University whose research explores the cultural histories, social imaginaries, and ideologies surrounding media, communication, and emerging digital technologies

Dr. Henning Lahmann is an assistant professor at eLaw – Center for Law and Digital Technologies at Leiden University Law School]

In 2010, at a conference organised by independent Dutch investigative journalism platform Follow the Money, multimedia design studio Catalogtree had been invited to present and discuss their 2008 poster series “Flocking Diplomats”. Based on a dataset consisting of all parking violations committed by diplomats in New York City between 1997 and 2005, this work attempted to visualise the total number of violations – no less than 143.702 – in such a way that audiences would immediately be able to grasp two key insights: one, this was a staggering amount, and two, data visualisations do not necessarily need to look like boring bar charts. One of the posters plotted the violations “in relation to the sun position as seen from Central Park”, and another as geolocated rectangular markers placed in thin concentric circles radiating out from the United Nations Headquarters, creating an abstract visual representation of lower Manhattan and Central Park along the way.

While the whole point of the Catalogtree presentation was to showcase how form could creatively be employed to critically comment on a specific type of socio-cultural behaviour – diplomats can just park their cars everywhere without needing to pay any fines – the conference audience was not convinced: many felt that the posters were simply fascinating to observe from a design perspective, with one attendee even angrily commenting that this kind of aestheticization risked detracting from the actual political issue at hand, normalising structural asymmetries of power embedded in urban life.

Fast-forward fifteen years, and it is obvious that public and academic debates about the power of (audio)visual representations of reality have evolved in step with technological change, reflecting both enchantment and unease with how generative AI and other data-driven mechanisms have radically put the production and politics of evidence center stage. Few domains illustrate this intertwining of persuasion and epistemic authority as clearly as open-source investigation (OSI). Reports from OSI collectives have arguably become a distinct genre: They combine the logic of data journalism, digital forensics, and human rights advocacy into intricate audiovisual narratives. Satellite images, social media posts, architectural models, and composited witness videos are carefully assembled into stories of violence and accountability. Yet what makes these investigations persuasive is not only their evidential content, but also their aesthetic form. They are designed to be seen as truthful.

Eyal Weizman, director of the research agency Forensic Architecture, has described this as forensic aesthetics: the idea that in presenting evidence via particular stylistic configurations it will be ‘sensed’ rather than merely intellectually understood, which then reinforces the perception of truth. This aesthetic ‘upscaling’ is decidedly not intended as a purely subjective or emotional strategy: When facts are rendered in an (audio)visual form capable of persuading publics and courts alike, their authority rests on their ability to be interpreted as objective while remaining affectively charged. Their appearance should be technical and exacting, and compositionally impressive – or even elegant – at the same time.

This fusion of aesthetics and evidence is not without ambivalence. While Susan Sontag and Ariella Azoulay argue that images that claim to bear witness to suffering always implicate their viewers, an ‘OSI style’ of reporting can make violence legible yet strangely remote. Moreover, the tension between visual allure and political urgency points to a broader issue, which is that the effectiveness of critical design may rely on the very aesthetic strategies deployed by mass entertainment media, privileging spectacle over reflective engagement. This dynamic is hardly new: Walter Benjamin, writing on the cultural and phenomenological changes brought about by the mass reproduction of (moving) images in the 1930s, warned that fascism sought to “aestheticise politics” by masking power through choreographed, seductive displays. In our contemporary media landscape, the visual artefacts of OSI obviously aim to expose state violence (not glorify it) but in their form they do risk complicating a straightforward apprehension of truth in its legal and political dimensions.

In legal fora, the digital aestheticism that the nascent work of OSI has embraced has been met with its own set of challenges. For one, there has been, and remains, an almost instinctive skepticism towards the form and way of presentation that many of the new actors in the field, and Forensic Architecture as their vanguard, by now have firmly established. The decision to utilize the explicitly non-legal site of the public museum or art gallery to stage investigative interventions has prompted a rejectionist attitude among parts of the legal profession. In an already notorious incident, a Munich court denied Forensic Architecture the opportunity to present their findings about one of the murders committed by the “National Socialist Underground” in 2006 – an investigation that cast serious doubt on the official state narrative – during the proceedings with the argument that the work merely constituted “art” and thus by definition failed to meet the required evidentiary standard (Marschall & Simke, 153).

More insidiously, the entities at the receiving end of most OSI work – state authorities – have begun to emulate the practice’s aesthetic language in an effort to undermine the credibility of civil society actors and their investigative outcomes. After the still relatively clumsy such attempts by Russia in the runup to the invasion of Ukraine, other states such as Israel have since learned to flood digital platforms with a never-ending stream of audio-visual material that bears all the prominent aesthetic markers that we have come to expect from OSI while spreading disinformation aimed at undercutting any emerging truth about state wrongdoing. In doing so, they not only deliberately make it even more difficult to get OSI recognized as a valid legal practice in institutional legal and quasi-legal settings like the International Court of Justice or the UN Security Council but also force civil society actors to constantly devote resources to disprove newly emerging false claims. As Linda Kinstler aptly remarked, “the very labor of responding to the lie can legitimate its premise”.

But the perils of digital aestheticism go beyond institutional reflexes. The commitment to the aestheticization of OSI can have an overwhelming effect which goes against the factual clarity required to make investigative outcomes legible in legal frameworks. Eyal Weizman advocates for the principle of “open verification”, which requires every critical part of an investigation to be transparently sourced and open to being verified by anyone. Yet by now, many presented works have reached a level of complexity that exposes the principle’s limits. The investigative aesthetics on display are often comprehensible only to forensic experts but not the publics, including in the legal profession, that these works ostensibly address. In consequence, the audience is once again left to believe or doubt the factual assertions made by the civil society actor.

And finally, the impressive technical skillset embodied in the dominant aesthetics of OSI risks creating a temptation to turn the focus exclusively on a string of singular instances of episodic state wrongdoing, which might end up obscuring the larger context that such transgressions are merely a part of. As J.J. Charlesworth noted, “[b]eyond the endless stream of particular instances and abuses, [big political questions] require us to develop much bigger pictures of what is ‘really’ happening”.

The challenge, then, is to ensure that a fascination with the image of truth does not eclipse the demand for action that truth entails. OSI underscores that the power of evidence does not reside solely in its accuracy, but in how it is made legible, persuasive, and culturally intelligible. At the same time, it reminds us that visual and technical sophistication cannot substitute for institutional recognition or sustained civic engagement.