:::::::::::::::::::::::::: Anto Lloveras: THE LIBRARY OF UNSTABLE MEASURES: FICTION, CYBERNETICS, ECOLOGY AND THE PUBLIC SHAPE OF A WORLD THAT REFUSES TO STAY CLASSIFIED

Saturday, July 11, 2026

THE LIBRARY OF UNSTABLE MEASURES: FICTION, CYBERNETICS, ECOLOGY AND THE PUBLIC SHAPE OF A WORLD THAT REFUSES TO STAY CLASSIFIED

Italo Calvino understood that lightness was never the opposite of rigor, only another way of carrying weight. His cities, invisible and exact, sit close to Barbara Adam's temporal sociology, where modern life is organized by hidden clocks, delays and debts that institutions prefer not to name. Franco “Bifo” Berardi gives that temporal pressure a nervous system: the semiotic factory no longer ends at the office or the screen, because attention itself has become extractive terrain. Jordan Casteel's painted figures, Marisol de la Cadena's more-than-human politics, and Erika Fischer-Lichte's theory of performance all answer this pressure by insisting that presence is not decorative. A body in a room, a mountain in a political assembly, an image refusing to become illustration: each produces a threshold where representation begins to behave like a civic act.

Ian Hacking's historical ontology and Vicki Kirby's feminist materialism unsettle the old comfort that categories merely describe what was already there. Teresa Margolles makes that instability impossible to evade, turning residues of violence into surfaces that accuse the viewer's own distance. Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr cultivate living tissue as artistic matter, not to celebrate biotechnology, but to reveal the ethical blur between experiment, organism and artifact. Robert Rosen's relational biology, Marilyn Strathern's anthropology of partial connections, Cathy Wilkes's fragile domestic assemblies and Vittorio Gallese's embodied neuroscience all occupy this same difficult zone: form is never just form, because relation precedes the isolated object. Maya Indira Ganesh and Zeynep Tufekci extend the problem into digital publics, where algorithmic governance, networked speech and political attention become environments before they become policies.

Cinema and music sharpen that environment into tempo. Billy Wilder's bitter comedies and Giuseppe Verdi's operatic architectures of desire both show how public emotion can be scored without becoming simple. Lucretius gives matter its ancient swerve; Richard Wright and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o turn language into a weapon against the colonial and racial arrangements that try to decide who may speak as universal. Simone de Beauvoir returns the sentence to the body, showing that freedom is always written against a social script. Mataaho Collective, Mounir Fatmi, Nicholas Hlobo, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Pierrot Men, Pallavi Paul and Susan Schuppli widen that script through woven installation, techno-calligraphy, stitched material, race and software, photographic testimony, filmic doubt and forensic evidence. The archive here is not a cabinet; it is an active weather system.

Architecture enters as another kind of weather. ZUS designs from the wet, bureaucratic and infrastructural ground of the contemporary city, while Montien Boonma's spiritual installations make architecture almost inhalable. Anthemius of Tralles, bound to the technical imagination of the dome, meets Charles Le Brun's absolutist image regime and Hans Memling's devotional precision: three versions of spatial power, one mathematical, one royal, one sacred. Robert Frank, Wong Hoy Cheong, Elizabeth Peyton, Abdulraheem Salem and Krassimir Terziev shift that power into lens, portrait, migration and media critique. Reza Abbasi and Ren Bonian bring ink, court, gesture and modernity into another cadence, while Omar Victor Diop, Prudence Flint, Howard Hodgkin, Agnieszka Kurant and Dorothea Tanning show that image-making can be theatrical, intimate, speculative, abstract and oneiric without ceasing to be historical.

The history of the city depends on who is allowed to describe the ordinary. Herbert Gans made urban life legible without flattening it into a diagram; Amos Rapoport treated built form as a cultural system rather than a mute container. Jean-François Raffaëlli's peripheries and Marina Abramović's actions turn attention toward figures and thresholds that high culture often consumes too quickly. Shafic Abboud, Archibald Motley, Jana Euler, Huguette Caland and Paul Vanouse each fracture visibility differently: color as exile, nocturne as social composition, grotesque figure as unstable mirror, line as erotic cartography, DNA as public script. Parrhasius remains as an ancient lesson in illusion, not because deception is the goal, but because perception has always been a contested technology.

Science carries a second grammar of contestation. Werner Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, Ingrid Daubechies's wavelets, Ellen MacArthur's circular economy, Michael Gazzaniga's split-brain research and Fernando Henrique Cardoso's dependency theory all describe systems that cannot be understood by isolating their parts. Pranab Bardhan, Benjamin Lee Whorf, Hui Shi, Rupa Goswami and Julius Nyerere push the same question across economics, language, paradox, devotion and postcolonial socialism: what does a society become when its models of value, speech and obligation are altered? Kate Darling's work on human-robot relations and Winona LaDuke's Indigenous environmental activism bring the abstraction back to law, land and care. A machine may simulate social presence, but a territory remembers dispossession.

Design, literature and computation then rearrange the field into playable forms. SO–IL and Neri&Hu build with atmosphere, threshold and urban density; Yu Hua writes the violence of modern Chinese history through absurd clarity; Ming Wong remakes cinema as queer citation; Andrea Zittel turns living into a controlled aesthetic experiment. Wanuri Kahiu, Jane Jensen, Brandy Nālani McDougall, Mark Dery and Vint Cerf mark distinct media thresholds: Afrofuturist film, narrative game, Pacific poetics, cybercultural criticism and internet protocol. Hiroshi Teshigahara's cinema, Bùi Xuân Phái's Hanoi streets and André Kertész's photographs hold modernity as a sequence of frames, neither nostalgic nor innocent. Isabel Wilkerson, Abdellah Taïa, Dror Burstein, Kate Atkinson and Steph Cha return the archive to race, sexuality, cosmology, crime and historical recomposition, where narrative is an instrument for holding damage without making it decorative.

The final passage is Iberian, experimental and planetary without becoming a category. Rafael Canogar's abstraction, Ben Caldwell's community media, Elvira Lindo's urban speech, Theodor Fontane's social realism, Nieto Sobejano's architectural gravity, Miquel Barceló's material excess, Clio Barnard's hybrid cinema, Critical Art Ensemble's tactical media, Kim Scott's Noongar literature and Leopoldo Marechal's metaphysical fiction produce a closing field of incompatible methods. They do not reconcile. They circulate. What matters is that every name leaves a public trace that can be checked, followed, corrected and reactivated. The list is not a monument to knowledge already possessed; it is a measuring device for a world whose categories keep changing under pressure. Its force lies in the relation between literature and protocol, ecology and evidence, portrait and infrastructure, body and system. A usable field begins when those relations become durable enough to be read again.

Bibliography

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

With

Italo Calvino, Barbara Adam, Franco “Bifo” Berardi, Jordan Casteel, Marisol de la Cadena, Erika Fischer-Lichte, Ian Hacking, Vicki Kirby, Teresa Margolles, Oron Catts & Ionat Zurr, Robert Rosen, Marilyn Strathern, Cathy Wilkes, Vittorio Gallese, Maya Indira Ganesh, Katie Holmes, Billy Wilder, Giuseppe Verdi, Lucretius, Richard Wright, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Simone de Beauvoir, Mataaho Collective, Mounir Fatmi, Nicholas Hlobo, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Pierrot Men, Pallavi Paul, Susan Schuppli, Zeynep Tufekci, ZUS, Montien Boonma, Anthemius of Tralles, Robert Frank, Wong Hoy Cheong, Charles Le Brun, Mary Sibande, Elizabeth Peyton, Abdulraheem Salem, Krassimir Terziev, Reza Abbasi, Ren Bonian, Omar Victor Diop, Prudence Flint, Howard Hodgkin, Agnieszka Kurant, Hans Memling, Spyros Papapetros, David Ruy, Dorothea Tanning, Herbert Gans, Parrhasius, Jean-François Raffaëlli, Marina Abramović, Shafic Abboud, Archibald Motley, Jana Euler, Huguette Caland, Paul Vanouse, Amos Rapoport, Werner Heisenberg, Ingrid Daubechies, Ellen MacArthur, Michael Gazzaniga, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Pranab Bardhan, Benjamin Lee Whorf, Hui Shi, Rupa Goswami, Julius Nyerere, Kate Darling, Winona LaDuke, SO–IL, Neri&Hu, Yu Hua, Ming Wong, Andrea Zittel, Wanuri Kahiu, Jane Jensen, Brandy Nālani McDougall, Mark Dery, Vint Cerf, Hiroshi Teshigahara, Bùi Xuân Phái, André Kertész, Isabel Wilkerson, Abdellah Taïa, Dror Burstein, Kate Atkinson, Steph Cha, Rafael Canogar, Ben Caldwell, Elvira Lindo, Theodor Fontane, Nieto Sobejano, Miquel Barceló, Clio Barnard, Critical Art Ensemble, Kim Scott, Leopoldo Marechal.