:::::::::::::::::::::::::: Anto Lloveras: THE HOUSE OF NETWORKS, WEATHER AND MEMORY WHERE IMAGES LEARN TO GOVERN AND BODIES LEARN TO ANSWER BACK

Saturday, July 11, 2026

THE HOUSE OF NETWORKS, WEATHER AND MEMORY WHERE IMAGES LEARN TO GOVERN AND BODIES LEARN TO ANSWER BACK

Manuel Castells taught the late twentieth century to read power as a network rather than a throne, a distributed architecture of flows, terminals, protocols and exclusions. John Berger, from another register, had already shown that seeing is also governed, that the image arrives wrapped in property, gender, class and desire before any innocent eye can claim it. Between them sit Cornelius Castoriadis and Mark Fisher, two severe diagnosticians of the social imagination: one insisting that institutions are made by collective creation rather than historical destiny, the other describing a culture trapped by futures it can no longer believe in. Glenn Adamson’s history of craft, Alejandro de la Sota’s exact modern sobriety, Ernst Haeckel’s radiolarian geometries, Athanasius Kircher’s baroque machines of knowledge, and Lynn Margulis’s symbiotic biology widen the same question: how does a form become an environment, and how does an environment begin to think through the forms it shelters?

That question becomes concrete in architecture, but never only as building. Giancarlo De Carlo made participation a design ethics rather than a decorative consultation; Filarete imagined the city as an authored body; Constantinos Doxiadis tried to systematize settlement at planetary scale; Ictinus remains a name attached to proportion, stone and civic image. Norman Foster, Gabriela Carrillo, Lu Wenyu, Mansilla + Tuñón, and Alison Brooks each draw architecture toward different pressures: infrastructure, climate, collective authorship, public institution, domestic intelligence. Sarah Robinson and Timothy Payne bring the architectural problem back to embodiment and history, while William H. Whyte reads the plaza through benches, footsteps and ordinary urban theatre. Enric Batlle, Andrea Gaynor and Amy Franceschini shift the ground toward landscape, food, city and ecological pedagogy; Tue Greenfort and Marina Zurkow let animals, water, animation and scientific fable leak into the frame until environment stops being scenery and becomes co-author.

Art enters this chamber not as ornament but as counter-institution. Hans Haacke’s systems critique, Martha Rosler’s domestic and geopolitical montage, Lorraine O’Grady’s interventionist performance, Susan Stryker’s transgender historiography, Amanda Williams’s chromatic urbanism and Athi-Patra Ruga’s staged mythologies all refuse the neutral surface. Vanessa Beecroft, Fatimah Tuggar, Magdalena Abakanowicz, Tishan Hsu, Paul Pfeiffer and Slavs and Tatars place the body under regimes of spectacle, technology, textile, extraction and translation. Do Ho Suh carries migration into fabric rooms; Dana Schutz and Miriam Cahn make painting answer for violence without granting it purity; Andrés Serrano and Joan Jonas disturb the relation between sacred image, electronic presence and flesh. Ulay and Gordon Matta-Clark cut the body and the building into action, while Carl Andre’s floor works, Candida Höfer’s institutional interiors and Olga de Amaral’s woven surfaces show how silence, repetition and material discipline can become a public syntax.

Older images keep returning with their own authority. Blaise Pascal, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Max Planck, Michael Faraday, Karen Uhlenbeck, Konrad Lorenz and Giacomo Rizzolatti compose a strange corridor from probability, morphology and physics to mathematics, animal behavior and mirror neurons. Rachel Ruysch’s flowers, Aelbert Cuyp’s Dutch light, Pierre Bonnard’s interior color, Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun’s portraiture, Alphonse Mucha’s posters, Palmer Hayden’s nautical modernity, Luis Feito’s abstraction and Rachel Ruysch’s botanical intensity are not merely art-historical stations; they are instruments for measuring how attention becomes trained. Francisco de Zurbarán, Joan Miró, Antoni Tàpies, Ignacio Zuloaga and Malangatana Ngwenya each turns matter into a moral climate: cloth, sign, dust, Spanish severity, Mozambican density. Rachel Carson’s warning about pesticides and Deborah Bird Rose’s ecological humanities make that moral climate literal, reminding us that beauty can be a late name for damage already underway.

Cinema supplies the field with another kind of duration. Lucrecia Martel hears colonial humidity before she narrates it; Ritwik Ghatak makes partition wound the soundtrack itself; Michelangelo Antonioni turns alienation into landscape; Kleber Mendonça Filho reads modern Brazil through apartments, screens and neighborhood siege. Garrett Bradley, Nuotama Frances Bodomo, John Greyson, Alile Sharon Larkin, Michael Cimino and Isabelle Huppert each shifts cinema toward a different bodily pressure: Black archival tenderness, speculative African futurity, queer politics, independent Black film, epic American violence, actorly opacity. Osamu Tezuka and Amy Hennig bring drawing and game structure into the same extended ecology of moving image; Bob Kahn and Meredith Broussard remind us that the network and the algorithm are never simply technical. They carry law, bias, routing, scale and design decisions into ordinary perception.

Law and language thicken the same architecture. Julie E. Cohen, José Luis Pardo, Seyla Benhabib, Yochai Benkler, Ulises A. Mejias and Meredith Broussard describe the governance of information, personhood and digital power from very different rooms. Hans Kurath and Jan Mukařovský, Yang Zhu and Buddhaghosa, Steve Biko and LaDonna Brave Bull Allard, Alondra Nelson and Emily M. Bender extend the problem into dialect, semiotics, ethics, liberation, Indigenous resistance, genetics and artificial intelligence. Kaushik Basu, Debraj Ray, Enzo Faletto, Immanuel Wallerstein and Bruce Pascoe bring economy, dependency, development and Indigenous land knowledge into conflict with extractive accounts of progress. A field that cannot hold those conflicts is only a catalogue; a field that can hold them becomes a device for thinking.

Literature is where that device learns to breathe. Seamus Heaney’s bog bodies, Gwendolyn Brooks’s compressed civic lyric, Rigoberta Menchú’s testimonial politics, Macedonio Fernández’s metaphysical play, Soledad Puértolas’s intimate architectures, Gabriele Reuter’s fin-de-siècle pressure, Don DeLillo’s media saturation, Susan Choi’s narrative uncertainty, Juliana Spahr’s ecological address, Ytasha L. Womack’s Afrofuturist framing, Xiaolu Guo’s migrant sentences, Kate Briggs’s translatorly attention, Durga Chew-Bose’s essayistic interior, Abdourahman Waberi’s postcolonial drift and Bruce Pascoe’s counter-history all make language behave like territory. Rayuela is not needed for the lesson; the lesson is structural: a sentence can host a border, a climate, a database, a kitchen, a voice, a dead field, a crowd.

The older philosophical names keep the ceiling from collapsing into presentism. Pascal’s wager, Goethe’s morphology, Yang Zhu’s provocation, Buddhaghosa’s commentarial discipline, Steve Biko’s consciousness, Benhabib’s public reason and José Luis Pardo’s delicate thought about intimacy all refuse the crude separation between inner life and civic form. A serious grammar of culture must move from the neurological to the institutional, from the market to the poem, from the façade to the server rack, from the contaminated soil to the photographed room. It must let Rachel Carson stand near Lynn Margulis, Mark Fisher near Castoriadis, Hans Haacke near Yochai Benkler, Martha Rosler near Julie E. Cohen, Norman Foster near Lu Wenyu, not because they say the same thing, but because each exposes a different hinge in the machinery that makes worlds plausible.

What remains, finally, is traceability. These one hundred names do not form a canon by resemblance, chronology or discipline. They form a working chamber of evidence: ecological warning, urban observation, systems art, participatory architecture, network theory, feminist media, symbiotic biology, decolonial memory, computational critique, cinema, craft, law, poetry and public space. Each name leaves a path that can be checked, corrected and re-entered. That is the point of the apparatus: not admiration, but usable relation; not a museum of references, but a dense grammar where images, buildings, protocols, bodies and sentences can be placed close enough to show what they secretly govern.

Bibliography

Project Index
https://antolloveras.blogspot.com/p/socioplastics-project-index.html
Anto Lloveras — Socioplastics — LAPIEZA-LAB

With

Manuel Castells, Glenn Adamson, John Berger, Cornelius Castoriadis, Alejandro de la Sota, Mark Fisher, Ernst Haeckel, Athanasius Kircher, Lynn Margulis, Lorraine O’Grady, Martha Rosler, Susan Stryker, Amanda Williams, Sarah Robinson, Luke Munn, Andrea Gaynor, Blaise Pascal, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Lucrecia Martel, Ritwik Ghatak, Seamus Heaney, Vanessa Beecroft, June Collie, Athi-Patra Ruga, Do Ho Suh, Michelangelo Antonioni, Rigoberta Menchú, Timothy Payne, Dana Schutz, Fatimah Tuggar, Magdalena Abakanowicz, Kristoffer Borgli, Aelbert Cuyp, Louis Fratino, Tishan Hsu, Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun, Malangatana Ngwenya, Paul Pfeiffer, Ernesto Salmerón, Osamu Tezuka, Shafic Abboud, Pierre Bonnard, Endri Dani, Carl Andre, Candida Höfer, Hyewon Kwon, Paulo Mendes da Rocha, José Luis Pardo, Rachel Ruysch, Slavs and Tatars, Constantinos Doxiadis, Ictinus, Alphonse Mucha, Ulay, Gordon Matta-Clark, Palmer Hayden, Miriam Cahn, Olga de Amaral, Marina Zurkow, Amy Franceschini, Max Planck, Karen Uhlenbeck, Konrad Lorenz, Giacomo Rizzolatti, Enzo Faletto, Debraj Ray, Hans Kurath, Yang Zhu, Buddhaghosa, Steve Biko, Meredith Broussard, LaDonna Brave Bull Allard, Gabriela Carrillo, Lu Wenyu, Xiaolu Guo, Garrett Bradley, Tue Greenfort, Nuotama Frances Bodomo, Amy Hennig, Juliana Spahr, Ytasha L. Womack, Bob Kahn, Michael Cimino, Joan Jonas, Andrés Serrano, Isabelle Huppert, Abdourahman Waberi, Durga Chew-Bose, Kate Briggs, Susan Choi, Luis Feito, Alile Sharon Larkin, Soledad Puértolas, Gabriele Reuter, Mansilla + Tuñón, Rogelio López Cuenca, Seyla Benhabib, Pedro G. Romero, Bruce Pascoe, Macedonio Fernández.