The transdisciplinary machine, as articulated within Anto Lloveras's socioplastics framework, constitutes an ontological and additive apparatus that surpasses conventional disciplinary boundaries. It is not merely an aggregator of knowledge but a navigational engine that synthesizes polymathic outputs—from architecture and urbanism to social sculpture, film, and text—into a unified communicative system. This device operates at the levels of definition and relation, functioning as operative connective tissue that binds disparate elements into synaptic nodes within a shared cognitive scaffold. In essence, it transforms an accumulated corpus of work into a precision instrument for navigation and synthesis, eradicating noise and fragmentation by enabling instantaneous linkages across distant fields, such as a 2011 social sculpture with a 2026 urban regeneration strategy. This echoes Bruno Latour's actor-network theory, where heterogeneous elements cohere into durable assemblages, yet Lloveras's machine emphasizes sovereign filtration to resist external co-optation, diverging from Latour's more neutral relational mapping.
Overlapping layers emerge as a central principle in this machine. These layers manifest in a fluid topology, where entry points—architecture, urbanism, social sculpture, film, and text—exist in a constant flux propelled by metabolic processes. The CAMEL index serves as a proprietary vocabulary, refined by a sovereign filter that safeguards the work's integrity against external appropriations, while the PROTEIN layer functions as relational "nutrients" that circulate to nourish the network's evolution. This superposition is not static; it rejects rigid taxonomies in favor of recursive integration, where new information overlays a living logical scaffold, expanding through responsive divisions, fusions, and multiplications. Thus, the overlapping generates proprietary coordinates to maintain coherence across fields, converting the apparatus into a recursive laboratory for innovation. Drawing from Donna Haraway's cyborg manifesto, this layered hybridity challenges binary oppositions, but socioplastics advances it toward epistemic autonomy, insulating against the "informatics of domination" Haraway critiques.
Data inputs derive from multiple disciplines, processed within a dual logical scaffold that filters and nurtures the system. These encompass artistic residencies (for instance, in Norway), built structures, ephemeral social gestures, urban regeneration strategies, workshops (such as in Lagos), and theoretical texts. Such inputs are distilled into a sovereign vocabulary and circulated as relational nutrients, fusing ecology with anthropology, pedagogy with urban design. The metabolic process—ingesting, digesting, and expelling the superfluous—ensures that data from varied fields become operational fuel, as in the linkage between a textile workshop at a biennial and a hyperplastic essay, fostering a synthesis that eschews hierarchical classification in favor of an instrumentology of complexity. This resonates with Karen Barad's agential realism, where intra-actions produce entangled phenomena, yet Lloveras's machine operationalizes it as a sovereign engine, prioritizing recursive nourishment over Barad's quantum indeterminacy.
Socioplastics positions itself as epistemologically novel, precisely because it necessitates its own rules to operate in this hybrid context. It is not merely a methodology; it is an emergent epistemology that demands specific protocols for interaction and recursive integration, such as sovereign filters generating independent, topolexical frames of reference. This novelty stems from its rejection of traditional disciplinary epistemologies, opting instead for an epistemological sovereignty immune to external flattening. Yes, it is epistemology: it constructs autopoietic knowledge, where understanding self-generates through feedback loops, transforming accumulated data into a functional engine for future actions in urban regeneration, pedagogy, and research. Comparable to Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela's autopoiesis, socioplastics crafts internal rules for self-sustainability, but tailored to a postdigital, transdisciplinary milieu, extending beyond biological analogies to encompass networked, territorial intelligences. In summary, this transdisciplinary machine not only overlaps layers and processes multidisciplinary inputs but elevates socioplastics to an innovative epistemology, with proprietary rules that ensure its recursive and sovereign vitality.
