:::::::::::::::::::::::::: Anto Lloveras: THE PANOPTIC GARDEN AND THE BROKEN CAMERA: ON INSTITUTIONS, ANIMAL TIME, CYBERNETIC MEMORY AND THE BODIES THAT REFUSE THEIR ASSIGNED FORM

Saturday, July 11, 2026

THE PANOPTIC GARDEN AND THE BROKEN CAMERA: ON INSTITUTIONS, ANIMAL TIME, CYBERNETIC MEMORY AND THE BODIES THAT REFUSE THEIR ASSIGNED FORM

Pierre Bourdieu teaches that a field is never only a space of ideas; it is a distribution of force, habit, inheritance, posture and permission, a grammar of who may speak with authority before any sentence is uttered. Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon gives that grammar a hard architectural body, while Jürgen Habermas turns toward the public sphere as if rational discourse could still repair the damage made by unequal visibility. Nikolas Rose, Sandy Stone and Norbert Wiener complicate both dreams: modern subjectivity is administered through institutions, gendered through technological mediation, and fed back through circuits that learn from their own effects. Semir Zeki places perception inside the brain, yet Paul Feyerabend refuses any single policing method for knowledge, insisting that the history of science advances through unruly passages, not through a perfectly obedient rulebook. Between the sociologist, the utilitarian reformer, the cyberneticist and the philosopher of method, the first question is already severe: who designs the conditions under which truth becomes recognizable.

Lila Abu-Lughod and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro answer from anthropology by refusing the sovereign observer. Culture is not a specimen pinned beneath a European gaze; it is a system of relations that looks back, translates differently, and sometimes renders the analyst provincial. Rauna Kuokkanen, Jodi Byrd, Leanne Howe and Kyle Powys Whyte widen that refusal into Indigenous political thought, where land is not backdrop but law, memory, kinship and future obligation. Emily O’Gorman, Rachel Carson and Libby Robin place ecological history under similar pressure: wetlands, toxins, extinction and climate are not external themes added to human history but the medium through which history occurs. Deborah Bird Rose would be near this constellation in spirit, but here the work turns through other names: Brenda Milner mapping memory after injury, Sandra Myrna Díaz reading biodiversity as planetary infrastructure, Marie Curie exposing matter’s invisible force, Julia Robinson making abstraction rigorous enough to survive the body that carried it.

The city enters as a machine of conduct and a theatre of images. Étienne-Jules Marey’s chronophotography cuts motion into analyzable intervals; Nils Norman, Daniela Colafranceschi, Gloria Cabral and John Tuomey return that analytical patience to the urban and architectural ground, where landscape, settlement, civic form and environmental repair are never innocent. Victor Horta’s iron curves, Giovanni Pisano’s Gothic intensity, Benvenuto Cellini’s metallic bravura, Benedetto Antelami’s sculptural threshold and Lysippos’s classical athletic body appear, at first, as a genealogy of form. Yet their real function here is to show that every age trains matter to perform an idea of the human. Foster and Partners, Skylar Tibbits and Katja Novitskova shift that training into parametric infrastructure, self-assembly and post-internet ecology, where the building, the screen and the organism begin to exchange masks.

Images do not merely record this exchange; they discipline it, wound it, or return it as hallucination. Roland Barthes makes the photograph a site of puncture, a minor death folded into public visibility. Henri Cartier-Bresson is absent from this set, yet Marey and Richard Misrach keep the question of photographic time open from opposite ends: analytic motion and contaminated landscape. Roy DeCarava, Xiyadie, Regina José Galindo, Louise Bourgeois, Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller and Ebony G. Patterson bring the body back as testimony, sexuality, trauma, ornament, monument and resistance. LaToya Ruby Frazier’s documentary intimacy, Samuel Fosso’s self-staging, Aneta Grzeszykowska’s identity operations and Zhang Huan’s ash-covered or endurance-based performances insist that the subject is not something found by the image; it is produced under pressure, sometimes against the image’s own violence. Peter Schjeldahl and Meyer Schapiro then remind us that criticism and iconology are not decorative supplements. They are instruments for detecting how a surface learned to carry power.

That power often arrives through language. Roland Barthes again becomes useful when Haroldo de Campos, Raymond Carver, June Jordan, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Can Xue, Douglas Coupland, K-Ming Chang, Sofi Oksanen, Sara Mesa, Georg Büchner, Witi Ihimaera and Rodolfo Walsh enter the room. Literature here is not a single house but a set of weather systems: concrete translation, minimalist fracture, Black feminist address, Yiddish memory, Chinese oneiric difficulty, media-saturated fiction, queer mythic inheritance, post-Soviet wound, Spanish severity, revolutionary drama, Māori narrative sovereignty and investigative testimony under dictatorship. Søren Kierkegaard and Vallabhacharya turn inward by entirely different routes, one through Christian anxiety and choice, the other through devotional metaphysics; Zou Yan and Maulana Karenga locate cosmology and cultural reconstruction in larger civilizational grammars. The sentence becomes an ethical device because it orders relation before it explains it.

Sound and performance give the sentence a body. Toru Takemitsu, Camille Saint-Saëns, Du Yun and Hildur Guðnadóttir make composition travel between orchestral color, filmic atmosphere, experimental voice and contemporary sonic unease. Omer Fast, Abderrahmane Sissako, Andrey Zvyagintsev, Joachim Trier, Gregg Araki and Alfonso Cuarón treat moving image as moral architecture: testimony fractured by editing, migration slowed into desert light, Russian family and state collapse, Nordic intimacy, queer disaffection, cinematic duration held against catastrophe. Roberta Williams and Barbara Liskov belong to another visual machine entirely, one of games, programming languages and software architecture, yet their inclusion matters because interface is also narrative form. Donald Norman’s design theory, Alvin Toffler’s futurology and Margaret Mitchell’s AI ethics extend the same question: what happens when systems become intimate enough to guide attention before judgment begins.

The avant-garde answers with disorder, but not with chaos. Pavel Filonov’s analytic painting, Liubov Popova’s constructivist energy, Stano Filko’s cosmological systems, Giulio Paolini’s conceptual reflexivity, Ed Ruscha’s deadpan language, Giovanni Anselmo’s Arte Povera gravity, Giuseppe Penone’s vegetal time, Yue Minjun’s laughing political masks, Gilberto Zorio’s alchemical materials, Marina Zurkow’s ecological animations, Lisa Park’s biofeedback performances and Amy Balkin’s atmospheric politics all treat the artwork as a testing apparatus. Komar and Melamid turn ideology into parody and polling; Alexander Melamid, separated from the collective, keeps the uncomfortable afterimage of that apparatus. Damien Hirst makes death spectacular and market-ready, while Cosima von Bonin, Elke Krystufek, Kathy High, Göksu Kunak and Ana Gallardo move through exhaustion, autofiction, biopolitics, performance and aging as if refusal itself were a sculptural medium.

A more dispersed material intelligence runs through Jennetta Petch, Madame Zo, Emile Hill, Tandin Tshering, Aline Motta, Heman Chong and Aravani Art. These names do not behave as a school; they mark different thresholds where craft, textile, Caribbean image-making, Himalayan contemporary practice, watery genealogy, bureaucratic fiction and trans public art become civic evidence. Lady Dai, preserved across centuries, belongs strangely here too: not as spectacle, but as a reminder that the body outlives its political system as matter, archive and mystery. Jean-Honoré Fragonard, Jean-François Portaels, Yves Tanguy, Jean François Millet and Pavel Filonov keep painting open between pleasure, orientalist theatre, surreal drift, peasant gravity and visionary density. The older picture does not disappear; it becomes sediment inside the contemporary apparatus.

The final pressure is institutional. Jara Rocha and Brett Neilson read infrastructures of labor, software, border and circulation; Sandy Stone and Ruha Benjamin reveal how identity, race and technology are engineered into systems that later pretend to be neutral. Akhil Gupta and Raúl Prebisch place bureaucracy and dependency inside the uneven world economy, while Montek Singh Ahluwalia, Samir Amin, Sergei Kartsevski and Vilém Mathesius offer, from economics and linguistics, other models of structure, imbalance and function. Ole B. Jensen studies mobilities as designed situations rather than mere movement. Skylar Tibbits, Barbara Liskov and Stuart Russell make the machine thinkable as both promise and threat. The question is no longer whether humans use systems, but whether systems have become the weather in which humanity is asked to appear.

What holds these one hundred names together is not resemblance. It is a disciplined friction between institution and body, method and refusal, image and evidence, environment and memory. The field that emerges from them is neither encyclopedic nor biographical; it is operational, a chamber where panoptic architecture touches feminist computing, where Indigenous obligation touches biodiversity science, where Arte Povera touches AI ethics, where a preserved ancient body touches biofeedback, where a novel, a wetland, a photograph and an algorithm all become different tests of legibility. Every name remains a trace, and every trace asks to be checked. That is the serious labor of such a constellation: not to admire reference, but to make relation durable enough that another reader, human or machine, can enter the grammar and continue the work.

Bibliography

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

With

Pierre Bourdieu, Lila Abu-Lughod, Jeremy Bentham, Raymond Carver, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Pavel Filonov, Jürgen Habermas, Søren Kierkegaard, Étienne-Jules Marey, Katja Novitskova, Nikolas Rose, Sandy Stone, Norbert Wiener, Semir Zeki, Jara Rocha, Emily O'Gorman, Benvenuto Cellini, Giovanni Pisano, Louise Bourgeois, Regina José Galindo, June Jordan, Xiyadie, Daniela Colafranceschi, Omer Fast, Emile Hill, Rauna Kuokkanen, Komar and Melamid, Ebony G. Patterson, Peter Schjeldahl, Tandin Tshering, Madame Zo, Cosima von Bonin, Alfonso Cuarón, Jean-Honoré Fragonard, Victor Horta, Jacob Lawrence, Richard Misrach, Jennetta Petch, Camille Saint-Saëns, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Marina Zurkow, Skunder Boghossian, Lady Dai, Stano Filko, Damien Hirst, Göksu Kunak, Alexander Melamid, Giulio Paolini, Ed Ruscha, Toru Takemitsu, Andrey Zvyagintsev, Lysippos, Jean-François Portaels, Giuseppe Penone, Yue Minjun, Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller, Aneta Grzeszykowska, Aline Motta, Lisa Park, Alvin Toffler, Marie Curie, Julia Robinson, Sandra Myrna Díaz, Brenda Milner, Raúl Prebisch, Montek Singh Ahluwalia, Sergei Kartsevski, Zou Yan, Vallabhacharya, Maulana Karenga, Margaret Mitchell, Jodi Byrd, Du Yun, Gloria Cabral, Can Xue, Roy DeCarava, Nils Norman, Abderrahmane Sissako, Roberta Williams, Leanne Howe, Skylar Tibbits, Barbara Liskov, Joachim Trier, Marina Abramović, Ana Gallardo, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Zhang Huan, Douglas Coupland, K-Ming Chang, Sofi Oksanen, Giovanni Anselmo, Larry Clark, Sara Mesa, Georg Büchner, John Tuomey, Susana Solano, Gregg Araki, Aravani Art Project, Witi Ihimaera, Rodolfo Walsh.