The relation of law and art is conventionally understood through a disciplinary divide that presents art as an instrument of legal practice and scholarship or, alternatively, presents law as potential context for artistic engagement. Moving beyond disciplinary definitions, in this article we explore how art and law, as modes of ordering and action in the world, often overlap in their respective desires to engage existing material orders. Whereas laws claim of producing order appears self-evident, we try to highlight, through a concept of legislative arts, the often-overlooked similar function of artistic practices. At the heart of what we refer to as legislative arts are practices that aim to challenge laws claim of authority in ordering social life through tactical combinations of elements of art and law. In examining a set of examples that include the Tamms Year Ten campaign to close a super-max prison in the United States, the work of Forensic Architecture and practices of passport forgery, we aim to highlight the possibility of manifesting social orders beyond an exclusive reliance upon state laws. Pointing to the potentials of such legislative arts practices, this article suggests that the material ordering quality of artistic and legal practices can, and perhaps should, be weaponized for challenging and remaking the world of unjust state laws.

This paper is an investigation of how the specific design and materiality of the artefact of the boat, as well as the various material, visual, technical and geographical practices at work in the space of Mediterranean Sea, orientate a specific space and produce a selective politics of seeing, saving and framing of bodies on the move. It highlights how the very presence and movement of ‘unseaworthy boats’ in this actively orientated space of the sea brings to the fore the many strategies and techniques that have been employed to make it a space of European control. We argue that this is an active and deadly orientation carried out in an often dispersed number of practices and interventions within a seemingly flat space of water. The paper concludes that border transgressors’ act of moving by boat, with all of the losses involved, both challenge and potentially reorientate European mobility regimes.

This research looks at questions of power and expression as they are composed in various ways within networked and computationally-informed situations of the present. Drawing from the term as it is originally invoked in practices of computing, the research puts forward execution as a central conceptual framework for its investigations. In a computer program, a program becomes executable when it is able to execute a set of procedures within a designated set of relations and affordances. Similarly, the concept of execution developed here looks at the ongoing negotiations of various formative relations and affordances (technical, cultural, material, political) in practices of execution, describing certain notable techniques applied towards the task of making things executable.

The examples looked at include several dominant media and technology practices of the present, as well as several alternative practices that point to other possible modes of execution. In doing so, the research highlights certain politically-orientated issues involved in questions of execution, working to further develop specific approaches aimed at describing, questioning and intervening into practices of execution as they occur in the world.