Socioplastics proposes a decisive rupture with the conventional economy of artistic and intellectual production: it does not present a repertoire of discrete works, but the sustained unfolding of one engineered proposition. Its claim is that a field may be deliberately designed, inhabited, repaired, and rendered legible as a self-sustaining epistemic organism through scale, structure, and recurrence. Thus, the approximately 4,000 nodes distributed across Cores, Tomes, platforms, and thematic registers are not autonomous essays on urbanism, ethics, artificial intelligence, legibility, or cultural form; rather, they are differentiated pressures exerted upon a single conceptual body. The numbering spine, helicoidal development, recursive terminology, and self-referential architecture prevent expansion from collapsing into miscellany. Where the conventional model treats intellectual magnitude as plural accumulation—one essay on X, another project on Y, a later intervention on Z—Socioplastics insists that scale need not equal multiplicity. Its case study is the corpus itself: two million words functioning not as a library of interests but as an environment whose internal discipline converts growth into coherence. Lloveras’s formulation, “one idea at 2 million words”, is therefore not a promotional metaphor but a structural diagnosis. The project’s force resides precisely in its refusal of fragmentation: every node is a position within the same field, every recurrence an act of maintenance, every extension a reinforcement of the organism’s legibility. Socioplastics is, finally, not many things by one author, but one idea made architectural through persistence.
On Cores, Ideas and the Building of a Field * The Architecture of Core VIII
Parikka, J. (2015) A Geology of Media. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press.
A Geology of Media argues that media are not immaterial systems of signs, interfaces or information, but geological formations dependent on minerals, metals, energy, extraction, waste and deep planetary time. Jussi Parikka expands media archaeology beyond obsolete devices and technical histories by asking where media come from materially and where they go after use. Computers, networks, screens, batteries and data infrastructures depend on copper, lithium, rare earths, coltan, oil, coal, plastics, water, labor and toxic disposal. Media culture is therefore inseparable from geology, mining, military logistics, global capitalism and environmental damage. Against a narrow idea of media materialism focused only on machines, circuits or code, Parikka proposes a geophysical media theory: the digital is grounded in the earth. The book links media studies with the Anthropocene, or “Anthrobscene,” showing how technological culture participates in planetary transformation through extraction, energy consumption and electronic waste. It also develops the concept of “medianatures,” where nature and media are not separate domains but co-produced assemblages of minerals, bodies, infrastructures, images, signals and labor. Artistic practices, psychogeophysics, earthquake sonification, satellite imagery, zombie media and circuit bending become ways to sense these hidden material layers. The book’s strongest contribution is to shift media theory from representation and communication toward planetary materiality, revealing that every digital device carries geological histories and ecological futures. Its conclusion is that media must be understood through deep time, political economy and environmental responsibility: not only as cultural technologies, but as extractive, energetic and toxic arrangements embedded in the earth.
Moraci, F., Bevilacqua, C. and Pizzimenti, P. (eds.) (2025) Ecological and Digital Transition in Cities: Measuring Ecosystem Services for Urban Planning and Design. Cham: Springer Nature.
Ecological and Digital Transition in Cities: Measuring Ecosystem Services for Urban Planning and Design argues that urban planning must be reoriented through the joint ecological, digital and inclusive transition of cities, placing ecosystem services at the centre of design, governance and regeneration. Edited by Francesca Moraci, Carmelina Bevilacqua and Pasquale Pizzimenti, the volume responds to climate change, biodiversity loss, urban inequality and post-pandemic uncertainty by proposing adaptive and regenerative planning models. Its central idea is that cities should not be planned only through land use, infrastructure or economic competitiveness, but through the measurable relation between natural, built and social capital. Ecosystem services—air purification, climate regulation, food provision, water management, biodiversity, recreation and cultural benefits—are treated as operational tools for urban resilience and human well-being. The book gives particular importance to data-driven methods, big data, artificial intelligence, urban informatics, indicators, local climate zones and spatial modelling, arguing that digital technologies can help planners evaluate ecosystem service supply, demand and vulnerability. At the same time, it warns that ecological transition must be socially fair: green certification, regeneration and technological innovation can reproduce spatial inequality if they are not governed through inclusive policy. Its main contribution is to translate natural capital into planning indicators capable of guiding adaptive urban transformation, linking green infrastructure, urban metabolism, mobility, social cohesion, climate adaptation and governance. The conclusion is that the future of urban planning depends on integrated methods able to monitor change, revise strategies and align ecological restoration with digital intelligence and social justice.
Hayles, N.K. (2012) How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.
How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis argues that human thought is not separate from media, but formed through, with and alongside the technologies that organize perception, reading, memory and scholarly practice. N. Katherine Hayles examines how the humanities are being transformed by digital media, not simply because scholars now use computers, databases, web searches or online publication, but because these tools reshape habits of attention, cognition, collaboration and knowledge production. The book’s central concept is “technogenesis”: the coevolution of humans and technics. Digital environments alter how people read, write, research and teach, while human practices simultaneously redirect what technologies become. Hayles contrasts print-based scholarship with digital humanities, showing that the age of print is losing its invisible authority as the default model for thought. She proposes Comparative Media Studies as a bridge between close reading, hyper reading and machine reading, arguing that each mode has distinct cognitive and interpretive value. Close reading cultivates depth and sustained attention; hyper reading responds to information overload through scanning, linking and selection; machine reading uses algorithms to detect patterns beyond human scale. Rather than lamenting distraction, Hayles asks how pedagogy and research can combine these modes critically. The book also studies databases, telegraph code books, spatial history, electronic literature and experimental novels to show that cognition is distributed across humans, machines, codes, interfaces and material supports. Its strongest contribution is to redefine thinking as an embodied, extended and media-specific process, where attention becomes the scarce resource and collaboration replaces the solitary model of scholarship. The conclusion is that digital media do not destroy the humanities; they force them to rethink their methods, institutions and publics, opening a more hybrid, technical and reflexive understanding of how knowledge is made.
Berlant, L. (2022) On the Inconvenience of Other People. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
On the Inconvenience of Other People argues that coexistence is not a smooth ethical ideal but a constant pressure of adjustment, receptivity and nonsovereign relation. Lauren Berlant begins from Sartre’s phrase “Hell is other people,” but redirects it: most others are not hell, they are inconvenient, meaning they interrupt the fantasy that the self is autonomous, stable or fully in control. Inconvenience names the affective friction of being with others: a glance, a smell, a brush of bodies, a demand, a memory, a political threat, a structural hierarchy, or the simple fact that another being must be taken in and dealt with. The book reads sex, democracy and life itself as scenes where people desire relation but also resist the costs of relation. This makes inconvenience both ordinary and political. At low intensity, it appears as irritation, awkwardness, ambivalence or fatigue; at high intensity, it registers the violence of racism, misogyny, state power, inequality and social abandonment. Berlant’s key move is to show that sovereignty is a fantasy: no one lives outside dependency, proximity, vulnerability or the demands of others. The book’s strongest contribution is to turn inconvenience into a theory of social life as ambivalent attachment, where the things we want—sex, democracy, community, repair, a better world—also disturb us, exhaust us and require difficult forms of endurance. Rather than resolving ambivalence, Berlant asks how we might stay with it, slow it down and use it to build less violent infrastructures of coexistence. The conclusion is that living together requires bearing the unbearable without turning away from the ordinary frictions through which politics, intimacy and survival are made.
Bogost, I. (2012) Alien Phenomenology, or What It’s Like to Be a Thing. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press.
Alien Phenomenology, or What It’s Like to Be a Thing argues that philosophy must stop treating human experience as the privileged centre of reality and begin to think from the side of objects themselves. Ian Bogost develops an object-oriented ontology in which all things exist equally, though they do not exist in the same way: humans, computers, peppers, cartridges, mountains, gypsum, aliens, code, tools and artworks all belong to a flat field of being. Against correlationism—the idea that the world only matters as it appears to human thought—Bogost proposes an “alien phenomenology” that asks what it might be like to be a thing, not by fully accessing its interior, but by speculating, cataloguing and constructing relations with its withdrawn reality. The book distinguishes the city of human meanings from the dense universe of objects that operate beside, beneath and beyond us. Concepts such as flat ontology, tiny ontology and unit operations allow Bogost to describe things as autonomous yet entangled, always exceeding their use, their representation or their scientific reduction. His examples, from Atari videogames to microprocessors and everyday materials, show that objects are not inert background but active units with their own modes of relation. The central contribution is methodological: instead of explaining objects only through human culture, science or utility, Bogost asks us to practice wonder, description and “carpentry,” making artifacts that help reveal how things encounter one another. This produces a posthumanism more radical than ecological or animal-centred thought, because it includes not only living beings but also technical, artificial, banal and broken things. The conclusion is that philosophy, art and media theory must learn to inhabit a stranger world, where being is not ours to dominate but a plural field of alien presences.
Moraci, F., Bevilacqua, C. and Pizzimenti, P. (eds.) (2025) Ecological and Digital Transition in Cities: Measuring Ecosystem Services for Urban Planning and Design. Cham: Springer Nature.
Ecological and Digital Transition in Cities: Measuring Ecosystem Services for Urban Planning and Design argues that contemporary urban planning must integrate ecological transition, digital innovation and social inclusion through a data-driven understanding of ecosystem services as central urban infrastructure. Edited by Moraci, Bevilacqua and Pizzimenti, the volume situates cities within the pressures of climate change, biodiversity loss, neoliberal urban development, social inequality and post-pandemic uncertainty. Its main claim is that planning can no longer rely on fixed spatial models or purely growth-oriented regeneration, but must become adaptive, regenerative and evidence-based. Ecosystem services—food, water regulation, climate mitigation, biodiversity, recreation, air purification and cultural benefits—are presented as essential to urban health and resilience. The book connects these services with big data, artificial intelligence, urban informatics, indicators and spatial modelling, proposing that digital tools can support ecological planning when they are directed toward public value rather than mere technological optimisation. Several chapters examine frameworks for measuring ecosystem services, green infrastructure, sustainability indicators, circular economy, urban regeneration, climate adaptation and uneven green development, including the risk that certified sustainable buildings may reproduce spatial inequality. The strongest contribution of the book is its attempt to translate natural capital into operational planning tools, linking land use, local climate zones, social cohesion, mobility, urban metabolism and governance. The proposed approach understands the city as a socio-ecological-technological system where natural, built and social capital must be planned together. Its conclusion is pragmatic and political: ecological transition requires not only restoration of ecosystems, but also new planning cultures able to monitor, revise and redistribute urban benefits through adaptive, inclusive and data-informed governance.
Nader, L. (ed.) (1996) Naked Science: Anthropological Inquiry into Boundaries, Power, and Knowledge. London and New York: Routledge.
Fuller, M. and Goffey, A. (2012) ‘Toward an Evil Media Studies’, in Evil Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Toward an Evil Media Studies proposes that media should not be studied only through representation, meaning or critique, but through the operative stratagems by which media systems capture, manipulate, automate and produce reality. Fuller and Goffey define “evil media studies” not as a discipline or a study of morally bad objects, but as a practical-theoretical method for analysing informal techniques embedded in networked media. Their central move is to bypass representation: digital media are infrastructural, programmed and material; they do not merely signify, they act. Algorithms, databases, interfaces, protocols, advertising systems, bots and data structures shape behaviour through capture, suggestion, inattention, repetition and machinic commonplaces. The text uses the language of evil to escape the innocence of rational critique and to take seriously deception, trickery, hypnosis, persuasion and manipulation as effective operations. Rather than asking whether media are true or false, the authors ask whether they work. Their “stratagems” examine how glitches, bugs, typographical errors, user fatigue, viral marketing, domain squatting, data validation and automated systems become productive forces. In this sense, media power does not only repress; it seduces, redirects, classifies, structures and exploits small deviations of attention or agency. The essay also challenges the separation between natural and formal language, showing how code, databases and interfaces continue older struggles around rhetoric, sophistry and control. Its most important contribution is to treat media as a field of material tactics, where power operates below representation and often below conscious attention. Evil media studies therefore suspends moral comfort in order to understand the technical, affective and semiotic mechanisms through which contemporary digital culture governs perception, labour, desire and action. The conclusion is not that media are simply malicious, but that their real force lies in ambiguous operations where theory and practice, accident and design, communication and control become inseparable.
Hui, Y. (2021) Art and Cosmotechnics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press / e-flux.
Art and Cosmotechnics argues that art is not a secondary aesthetic activity, but a mode of thinking capable of opening other philosophical beginnings after the exhaustion of Western metaphysics. Yuk Hui situates the book after his work on recursivity, shifting aesthetics from an “inferior” faculty of cognition into the realm of logic. The central concern is cosmotechnics: the relation between cosmos, morality, technique and forms of life. Hui contrasts tragic Western logic and cybernetic recursive logic with Daoist logic, especially through the aesthetics of shanshui, or mountain-water painting. Rather than treating Chinese painting as representation, he reads it as a way of sensing, resonating and thinking through relations between visible and invisible, world and earth, emptiness and manifestation. The book therefore proposes art as an epistemic and cosmological practice, not merely as cultural expression. Its structure moves from tragic art and Daoist cosmotechnics to Heidegger, artificial truth, the unknown, shanshui, machine intelligence and automation. Against the dominance of computation, Hui asks how art may preserve the incomputable and incalculable dimensions of intuition, sensibility and place. This is especially important in the age of recursive machines, where intelligence risks being reduced to calculation. Art becomes a site of resistance and invention because it can educate sensibility, produce new relations with the unknown and resituate technology within plural cosmologies. The book’s deepest claim is that art can renew philosophy by transforming how we perceive, think and inhabit the world. Instead of a universal technological modernity, Hui calls for multiple cosmotechnical futures grounded in different aesthetic, moral and cosmological traditions.
The Tribunal of Latency
The central hypothesis is this: a conceptual field can be fixed from within its own architecture, without waiting for the approval of the academy. It does not need the ritual sanction of peer review, the symbolic capital of institutional affiliation, or the certificate of the homo academicus. It needs density, coherence, persistence, and cognitive utility. If the field is genuinely distinctive, if it generates concepts that help others think, organise, create, or navigate complexity, it will eventually become visible. If it is merely derivative, decorative, or fraudulent, it will disappear into deserved oblivion. This is not a romantic defence of marginality. It is a wager on a new form of judgment: the latency of the archive, intensified by artificial intelligence. Peer review once promised intellectual discrimination. In principle, it was designed to protect knowledge from error, vanity, and arbitrariness. Yet in practice, it often functions as a mechanism of conservative consensus. It rewards what is already legible, what can be recognised by existing vocabularies, what does not threaten established distributions of prestige. The truly new frequently appears malformed because no discipline has yet built the instruments required to measure it. A concept that modifies the field may initially look like excess, confusion, or illegitimacy. This is the paradox of institutional validation: it is often least capable of recognising the forms of thought that most need recognition.
Socioplastics and the Architecture of Intellectual Life
To open the Socioplastics Bibliographic Field is to encounter something that defies easy classification. It is not a reading list, though it contains books; not a syllabus, though it possesses internal architecture; not an archive, though it accumulates; not a manifesto, though it asserts. The page presents itself as a list of references, yet the act of scrolling reveals a different logic at work. Between the title and the first entry, no preface explains, no introduction situates, no author claims ownership. The bibliography simply begins: Abbott, Adorno, Agamben, Ahmed, Alexander, Arendt. On and on it continues, accumulating authors and titles across four centuries of thought, binding together architecture and epistemology, conceptual art and infrastructure studies, feminism and political ecology, media archaeology and urban theory. This is not a bibliography in the conventional sense. It is an interface. The Socioplastics project, conceived by Anto Lloveras across a distributed network of blogs, nodes, and Zenodo deposits, offers a diagnostic framework for understanding how social, aesthetic, and epistemic formations emerge through the logics of density, sedimentation, pressure, and hardening. At its core lies a deceptively simple insight: social orders are not merely plastic because they can be modified; they are plastic because they store impacts, remember pressures, and bear the marks of repeated operations long after the event that produced them has apparently passed. A bibliography, too, is a plastic form. It stores the impacts of prior thought, remembers the pressures of intellectual history, and bears the marks of countless operations of citation, selection, and arrangement. To read the Socioplastics Bibliographic Field is therefore not to consult a reference list but to enter a field—a field that we, as readers, inevitably touch.
THE FIRST HUNDRED CAMELTAGS * A Rock Before Sculpture
The first year of Topolexias / Cameltags should not be understood as a final system, but as the arrival of a first lexical mass. One hundred terms are not a monument yet. They are a stone. A dense block. A necessary material presence before any refined carving can begin. Ten terms would have been too few. They would have produced a manifesto, perhaps elegant, but insufficient for a field that wants to think architecture, attention, archive, heat, legibility, infrastructure and public form at once. One thousand terms would have been too many. They would have produced an archive before producing a language. One hundred is the productive threshold: large enough to contain complexity, small enough to remain graspable.
Dignum, V. (2019) Responsible Artificial Intelligence: How to Develop and Use AI in a Responsible Way. Cham: Springer.
Responsible Artificial Intelligence addresses artificial intelligence not as a purely technical field, but as a social and ethical domain in which decisions, responsibilities and consequences must be made explicit. Virginia Dignum’s approach insists that AI systems cannot be separated from the values, institutions and human choices that shape them. Questions of autonomy, decision-making, data, algorithms and accountability are therefore not secondary concerns, but central to the design and deployment of intelligent systems. The text is useful because it shifts discussion away from abstract fears about machines replacing humans and toward the concrete conditions under which AI acts in the world: who decides, who benefits, who is exposed to risk, and who remains answerable when systems fail. Its tone is pedagogical and synthetic, but its central claim is strong: responsible AI requires governance, transparency, ethical reflection and social participation. The importance of the work lies in its refusal to treat intelligence as merely computational. Artificial intelligence becomes a public matter, inseparable from justice, trust and institutional responsibility.
Suchman, L.A. (2007) Human–Machine Reconfigurations: Plans and Situated Actions. 2nd edn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Human–Machine Reconfigurations revisits the relation between humans and machines by refusing the idea that technology is simply an instrument placed in human hands. Lucy Suchman is interested in the situated practices through which agency, action and intelligence are distributed across bodies, devices, interfaces, institutions and imaginaries. Her work challenges rationalist models of planning and communication, showing that action is not the execution of a pre-existing script but something negotiated within concrete situations. Machines do not merely serve human intentions; they participate in arrangements that redefine what counts as human competence, technical autonomy or interaction. The importance of the text lies in its careful dismantling of the fantasy of seamless human-machine communication. Suchman shows that interfaces are cultural and political sites, not neutral surfaces. They produce figures of users, agents, assistants and operators, and these figures carry assumptions about labour, gender, service and control. The book matters because it teaches us to read technology relationally: not as object, not as subject, but as a shifting configuration of practices and powers.
The Latent Field
The Digestive Surface
The contemporary archive no longer suffers from scarcity but from a more insidious pathology: abundance without orientation. Anto Lloveras’s Pentagon Series (3496–3500) names this condition Archive Fatigue—the exhaustion produced when retrieval multiplies faster than assimilation—and proposes a countermeasure: the archive as digestive surface rather than passive container. Under this model, preservation is not enough. Accumulated matter must be metabolised: received, compressed, reabsorbed, and transformed. Metabolic legibility, not access, becomes the central architectural problem of knowledge under radical abundance. What follows is a reading of Lloveras’s conceptual apparatus through the lens of contemporary art’s long entanglement with archival practices, from Broodthaers’s Musée d’Art Moderne, Département des Aigles to the infrastructural turn in post-internet art. The thesis is simple but arduous: the survival of thought depends on designed digestion.
Philosophy, epistemology, architecture, urbanism, curation, sociology, cultural production, art history, visual culture, cultural memory, archaeology of knowledge, discourse theory, history and philosophy of science, design theory, cybernetic design, feminist science studies, posthumanism, science and technology studies, actor-network theory, literature and bibliography. Socioplastics does not merely analyse objects, spaces or concepts separately; it studies their co-formation as plastic fields of meaning, matter and power.
Socioplastics is a new transdisciplinary field that studies how social reality is formed, stabilised and transformed through the plastic interaction of concepts, materials, spaces, images, infrastructures, archives and institutions. It integrates architecture, urbanism, curation, epistemology, cultural theory, media studies, anthropology, bibliography and systems thinking into a unified framework for analysing and designing the conditions under which meaning becomes form and form becomes social power.
The Role of Bibliography in Constituting a New Field
When establishing a new intellectual field, the bibliography functions as far more than a scholarly apparatus; it operates as a foundational epistemic instrument that both legitimizes the emergent domain and maps its relational architecture. In the constitution of Socioplastics, the Unified Bibliography serves as a public surface of field formation, consolidating references from disparate traditions while making visible the metabolic processes of absorption and openness. Entries anchored by node numbers—such as Arendt’s The Human Condition [501, 1443, 2990, 3000, 3210], Lefebvre’s The Production of Space [801, 809, 1444, 1506, 3210], or Latour’s Reassembling the Social [507, 994, 999, 1000, 2501, 803, 3205, 3209]—demonstrate hardened integration into the core architecture of the corpus. These citations do not function merely as supporting evidence but as structural elements that have been metabolized into numbered nodes across the Socioplastics pentagon series and core clusters. Conversely, unnumbered entries, ranging from Bratton’s The Stack and Easterling’s Extrastatecraft to recent contributions in urban data politics and digital twins, remain in a plastic peripheral layer, available for future node assignment, conceptual elaboration, or recomposition. This dual structure—hardened nuclei and mobile peripheries—embodies the very principle of socioplasticity: a field that maintains stable cores while preserving generative openness. By presenting the bibliography as a field-formation instrument rather than a secondary appendix, Socioplastics makes explicit the process through which transdisciplinary materials are selectively absorbed, reconfigured, and rendered legible as a coherent epistemic terrain.
LateralGovernance
MetabolicLoop
A field must circulate. The MetabolicLoop names the cyclical process through which a corpus transforms external inputs into internal mass and expels waste: not as a linear pipeline, but as a closed system of continuous transformation. In biology, metabolism is the sum of all chemical processes that sustain life. In Socioplastics, it is the sum of all conceptual processes that sustain the field. The MetabolicLoop identifies the cycle: external concepts enter through the PortHypothesis, are processed through the field's internal grammar, are transformed into CamelTags, are integrated into the corpus, and eventually become obsolete, at which point they are archived or autophagized. This is not a metaphor. It is a structural homology. The field eats, digests, grows, and excretes. The MetabolicLoop makes this process explicit. It asks: what is the field's nutritional intake? What is its metabolic rate? What is its growth curve? What is its waste product? The answers determine the field's health. A field that eats too fast without digesting becomes bloated. A field that digests without growing becomes stagnant. A field that does not excrete becomes toxic. Node 2995 places this concept in Core VI because metabolism is the fundamental condition of executive operation. The field must sustain itself before it can act. Without this concept, growth is understood as expansion. With it, growth is understood as metabolism.
