Location: San Francisco, CA
Medium: Net art, digital art, interaction design
Website: theyrule.net
Josh On was born in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 1972. He studied interaction design at the Royal College of Art in London, and in 1998 came to San Francisco as an artist-in-residence with Futurefarmers, the art and design collective founded by Amy Franceschini. On went on to become a partner in the studio, collaborating with Franceschini for several years while developing a series of web-based projects that used interactive data visualization to expose systems of corporate and political power.
On is best known for They Rule (2001), a browser-based visualization mapping the interlocking board memberships of America’s largest corporations. The project was revamped in 2004 with expanded data drawn from SEC filings and corporate directories, and was later updated using data from the watchdog database LittleSis.org. They Rule was included in the Whitney Biennial 2002 at the Whitney Museum of American Art, won the Net Vision / Net Excellence award at Prix Ars Electronica in 2002, and was featured a decade later in MoMA’s Talk to Me exhibition (2011) as an early landmark in interactive data visualization.
Alongside They Rule, On created Anti-Wargame (2001), a policy simulation about the mechanics of waging war, and Exxon Secrets (with artist Amy Balkin, commissioned by Greenpeace), which mapped ExxonMobil’s funding of climate-change-skeptic organizations. He has continued to work as an interaction designer and developer based in San Francisco, applying data-driven, systems-mapping approaches to social and political subjects.
On’s work sits at the intersection of net art, information design, and political research. Rather than illustrating a predetermined argument, his projects function as investigative tools: databases of public records — corporate filings, board rosters, funding disclosures — rendered as interactive, explorable networks that let viewers draw their own connections. The visual language is spare and diagrammatic, often reducing powerful institutions and individuals to simple icons (a briefcase-carrying figure whose size reflects the number of boards a director sits on) whose accumulation reveals concentration of power more effectively than text alone could.
This approach — turning bureaucratic and financial data into legible, navigable maps — anticipated much of the data-journalism and civic-tech visualization work that followed. On’s practice treats the web itself as a democratizing medium, using its capacity for hyperlinking and cross-referencing to make institutional relationships that are technically public but practically invisible newly visible and searchable.
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