Proximity as Method situates Socioplastics within a live intellectual field and tests alignment through calibrated divergence. With Yuk Hui, the proximity lies in cosmotechnics as technodiversity—the refusal of a single, universal technical destiny. The divergence is decisive: Socioplastics operationalises cosmotechnics as a Low-Energy Hyperlinked Mesh, privileging infrastructural frugality and persistence over speculative abstraction. Cosmotechnics becomes executable through mesh-density, citational anchoring and semantic hardening. Technodiversity is not an ethos alone; it is a maintenance protocol. With Keller Easterling, the affinity resides in medium design: power operates through repeatable spatial formulas and infrastructural dispositions. Socioplastics adopts this infrastructural literacy yet extends it via Topolexical Sovereignty—the capacity of a conceptual territory to maintain linguistic autonomy under algorithmic pressure. Where medium design diagnoses spatial software, the mesh engineers Epistemic Counter-Software: a citational grid that resists platform capture. The project thus shifts from analysing infrastructural power to cultivating infrastructural immunity. Édouard Glissant’s right to opacity provides ethical grounding. The proximity is relational multiplicity; the divergence is operationalisation. Opacity becomes protocol: selective legibility, calibrated disclosure, strategic density. Through Operational Opacity, the mesh refuses total extractability while sustaining internal coherence. This is not withdrawal but relational filtering—an infrastructural translation of poetic resistance.
Niklas Luhmann offers the grammar of systems: operational closure, self-referential reproduction, structural coupling. Socioplastics aligns with Operational Closure yet retools it as Citational Commitment—a disciplined practice that stabilises boundaries through traceable genealogies. Closure is not isolation; it is coherence under exchange. The mesh couples with technological cycles (Web 2.0 to Generative AI) without forfeiting systemic identity. Susan Leigh Star and Geoffrey Bowker anchor the infrastructural dimension. Their insight that infrastructure becomes visible upon breakdown informs the mesh’s anticipatory stance. Socioplastics foregrounds Maintenance as Method, embedding care, repair and versioning into its architecture. Consoles function as boundary objects—robust across communities yet plastic within contexts—yet the divergence lies in sovereignty: boundary work is coupled to a Systemic Lock that prevents conceptual drift. This cartography addresses the “missing hand” of material practice. Through LAPIEZA’s 300+ projects and a deliberately low-tech persistence, the mesh adds curatorial muscle and pedagogical execution to otherwise abstract theory. It becomes the practical arm of cosmotechnics and systems theory—an applied choreography where theory is treated as executable code. The result is a complete package: a synthetic framework with thesis, method and conclusion; a running mesh that thinks hard, resists quietly and keeps going. In the city of ideas, Resilient Frameworks is the map: it shows where Socioplastics stands, which edifices it converses with, and how divergence becomes construction.
Anto Lloveras is a transdisciplinary architect, theorist, curator, and researcher who redefines architecture as operative epistemic infrastructure — a metabolic system for sovereign knowledge production in volatile times. Trained at ETSAM (Madrid) with early experience on large-scale projects. https://antolloveras.blogspot.com/