AN ARCHAEOLOGY OF
PUBLIC INNOVATION IN COURTS
Judicial Ruins
is a four-channel video exhibition of footage uploaded by the Chilean judiciary to their official YouTube channel. Drawing on remix internet culture, the original footage is altered and modified to give new meaning to a judicial system in a crisis of corruption and legitimacy. The exhibition is staged with "found" objects, from old TV monitors to possible evidence from the corruption cases.WHAT IS BEING EXCAVATED?
Public hearings, institutional broadcasts, YouTube residues, disabled comments, fragments of legal theatre, failed promises of transparency, and the uneasy remains of justice performed through platforms.
PROJECT CLAIM
THE COURT AS A PLATFORM RUIN
Judicial Ruins
begins with a simple question: what happens to public innovation projects after the promise of innovation collapses?This exhibition aims to breathe new life into abandoned or discarded digital public innovation projects by focusing on the Chilean judiciary's use of social media platforms like Facebook and YouTube for streaming judicial hearings. In an effort to promote transparency and enhance public trust in judicial institutions, Chilean courts have intensively used social media platforms since 2012 to engage directly with their users. Over time, this innovative practice has generated vast amounts of publicly available content, represented by video recordings posted on YouTube as a byproduct of live-streamed court hearings. These recordings can be viewed as “sediments” within the digital landfill—an accumulation of video material that is archaeological traces of an institution in crisis.
The
Judicial Ruins
project explores the potential for individuals and communities to reclaim and create new public value from these abandoned public resources, through the framework of tactical media and by the means of found footage approach. Drawing on the concept of "digital pirquinería"—a term inspired by artisanal mining practices in Chile—the exhibition invites citizens to appropriate, remix, and reinterpret these recordings to reconfigure notions of justice and public innovation beyond the state. By adopting a geological perspective, the chapter proposes that these digital remnants can be mined to foster new forms of democratic participation and engagement. Extending the idea of public innovation beyond the formal boundaries of state apparatuses and public institutions, this chapter envisions innovation emerging from informal and grassroots spaces, opening up new possibilities for participation and public value creation.#POLITICALAGENCY#DIGITALCULTURE#DIGITALRECYCLING
CORPUS AND DATA
WHAT THE LANDFILL CONTAINS
The research identifies the Chilean judiciary’s YouTube presence as a vast audiovisual residue of institutional transparency: public enough to circulate.
PERIOD IN WHICH APPROXIMATELY 1,200 VIDEOS WERE IDENTIFIED
VIDEOS IDENTIFIED IN THE INITIAL CORPUS
POSSIBLE EDITED AND PUBLISHED VIDEOS AFTER FURTHER EXPLORATION
ESTIMATED AUDIOVISUAL MATERIAL, BASED ON AVERAGE DURATION
The 20 most-viewed uploads gathered around 3.9 million views in total, an average of nearly 195,000 views per video. At the other end, the least-viewed videos were difficult to identify because the channel’s volume made it impossible to reach the bottom of the upload list.
The videos remain online and also appear through institutional TV infrastructures. Yet they are not integrated into a systematic archive with clear description, preservation, educational framing, or public policy. Their comments are disabled, reducing the participatory promise of the original media strategy.
These unarchived recordings stand as ruins of a truncated innovation. They bear witness to ambitions of transparency and participation that never reached their intended fulfilment, while leaving behind a large body of public media that still shapes how justice is seen.
APPROACHES
... to mining the digital landfill
1/ The
Open Pit
Open Pit
2/ The
Tunnel
Tunnel
3/ The
Pirquinero
Pirquinero
The exhibition presents four independent explorations by the authors. Our goal is to advance in working based on these media strata, exploring methodologies that allow us to restore their complexity and layers of meaning to the base material we are investigating.
CASES
1/ In search of the sublime
This exploration offers an audiovisual artefact resulting from transposing the audio of a Machiliwün onto a video of the Chilean Supreme Court plenary. In the Machiliwün, while some are drumming, others participate by hitting sticks of wood, to one another or the ground, to the soil, sand, and stones under their feet. We take the sound of the drums and the sticks and bring them into a virtual courtroom, creating an artefact in which we subvert the modern institution of the courts by bringing in elements from elsewhere, a design pavilion and an ancestral ritual. Moreover, we counter-subvert the physical courtroom, subverted by the videoconferencing platform interfaces and functions, by adding layers of sounds that otherwise do not belong to that space, giving a sense of ritual to a space dominated by an aesthetic of Zoom’s corporate vision: “frictionless communication”.
An overview of the transposition of audio recordings from the Machitún onto the recordings of judicial hearings of the Chilean Supreme Court in both physical and online environments. We transposed the audio recording of the Machitún into the hearing of the plenary of the Supreme Court, both physical and online.
2/ Muñeca Bielorrusa
This experimental work draws inspiration from the corruption scandal known in Chile as the "Hermosilla Case" or "Audio Case". Central to this scandal is Luis Hermosilla, a prominent Chilean lawyer who specialised in complex litigation with extensive political and business networks. Between 2023 and 2024, Hermosilla became embroiled in a significant controversy following leaked recordings that revealed his coordination of alleged bribery and influence trafficking involving public officials and judicial authorities to secure privileged information. Subsequent investigations allegedly positioned Hermosilla at the core of a wide-reaching institutional corruption network, severely undermining public confidence in Chile's judicial system. Hermosilla currently faces charges including bribery, tax fraud, and money laundering.
Three frames from the video montage combining fragments from Ángela Vivanco’s greeting on behalf of the Chilean Judiciary for the 75th anniversary of the Declaration of Human Rights; audio excerpts that triggered the Hermosilla case; CODELCO’s explanatory video regarding the death of Francisco Trigo Escobar; and visual references to the face of Ángela Vivanco juxtaposed with images from CODELCO and other media sources (Own production).
3/ Seeking Alloys of Meaning
This exploratory method aims to create relationships of tension/resonance between image and audio. In the case of Figure X, the audio is taken from a video on the YouTube channel of the Chilean judicial system. This audio narrates a deadly crime on a beach in Chile. The event is tragic and trivial, given the hundreds of similar videos on this YouTube channel and the bloody nature of the event. The operation consists of accompanying the sound with an AI-generated video. The image emerges from an iterative process resulting from a non-directed computational process.
AI-generated video featuring audio from a crime. The audio was sourced from the Chilean judicial system's YouTube channel.
4/ Phantom Hearings
Phantom hearing is an archival/found-footage video montage combined with a machine learning-based tool for depth processing in videos. In reference to Judy Radul’s World Rehearsal Court2, these framings are more cameratic than cinematic, as Sharon Kahanoff3 would describe the camera feeds in Radul’s work. By depersonalizing the actual actors and people involved in the process and creating a form of blind hearings, suitable for machinic vision, or a re-signified memory of a legal process, ghosts are trapped in a legal and digital protocol.
Screengrabs from Phantom Hearings [video] (2025).
AUTHORS
JOAQUÍN SANTUBER
METAVERSE LAB, JKU LINZ & SCHOOL OF DESIGN, PONTIFICIA UNIVERSIDAD CATÓLICA DE CHILE
KRISTINA TICA
METAVERSE LAB, JKU LINZ, DIE ANGEWANDTE
PABLO HERMANSEN
SCHOOL OF DESIGN, PONTIFICIA UNIVERSIDAD CATÓLICA DE CHILE
MARCOS CHILET
SCHOOL OF DESIGN, PONTIFICIA UNIVERSIDAD CATÓLICA DE CHILE