A contemporary subject is increasingly formed by infrastructures that must first make it addressable. Addressability is more than identification: it is the capacity of a system to locate a person, place or trace within an operational field and then return an action to it. Razinsky’s algorithmic subject exists through precisely this loop. Personalisation promises maximum singularity, yet it acts on a data double assembled from heterogeneous traces and the statistical residues of others; the more specifically the system appears to address “me”, the more the coherent subject is dispersed into operational fragments. Demirci’s Talking Mirror gives this recursion an experiential form: digital systems process behaviour and return ranked, filtered and optimised versions of the user that then participate in subsequent self-perception. The mirror no longer reflects; it intervenes. Are and Briggs locate an adjacent transformation in platformised labour, where multiple occupational identities are deliberately collapsed into shared public contexts. Their “context collusion” shows that visibility is not simply imposed by platforms but strategically inhabited, although always under the economic conditions of precarity, self-branding and influencer creep. Peters and Bengtsson complicate any account that would make the subject a passive product of these infrastructures.
Their queer and political framework treats contradiction as evidence of the limits of determination: identity becomes political where inherited binaries cannot fully organise a performance, and the subject appears in the gap between available positions. The teacher who becomes simultaneously subject and object in relation to the computer is not merely representing an alternative identity but disturbing the disciplinary grammar that separates human from non-human, technical from affective and mastery from relation. Addressability therefore names a tension rather than a stable state. Systems require entities that can be found, classified and acted upon, but subjectivation repeatedly produces excess, ambiguity and counter-positioning around those addresses. Qiu and colleagues shift this logic from person to city by turning urban collective memory into a locatable semantic-spatial field. Social-media traces, NLP and GIS make paths, nodes, landmarks, districts and edges into computable mnemonic structures, revealing how public identity and historical continuity concentrate unevenly across Nanjing. Lister then exposes the governance problem latent in such mappability: an urban memory that depends on proprietary infrastructures remains vulnerable to enclosure, disappearance and unequal visibility. His Fediverse model treats citizen-generated memory as a civic digital public good whose discoverability, moderation, privacy, interoperability and ownership are political conditions of remembrance. Vrebos, Hermans and Hannes supply the necessary methodological counterweight. Their go-along walking practice produces knowledge that is not already formatted for retrieval: memories surface through bodily movement, sensory encounter, hesitation, affect and contact with human and other-than-human agencies. Deep mapping registers these distributed relations without pretending that they arrive as clean variables. Across algorithmic profiling, queer performance, platform labour, civic archives, computational memory maps and walking research, the self and the city converge as operationally addressable but never fully reducible entities. For Socioplastics, addressability offers a way to connect corpus, archive, urban fieldwork and infrastructure without collapsing them into a single medium. Every corpus already contains an implicit addressing system: filenames, metadata, categories, geolocation, timestamps, links, identifiers and search structures determine what can later be found, compared or made public. Every map similarly decides which traces acquire spatial legibility, while every archive decides what remains available to future retrieval. The central question is therefore not simply what information is collected but how a person, place, event or memory becomes callable inside a system and what occurs when that call returns to the world. Razinsky makes visible the risk of an address so granular that it destroys common space; Demirci shows how returned representations enter subjectivation; Qiu demonstrates the analytical power of spatial-semantic addressability; Lister makes governance and public ownership part of the archive’s epistemic design; Vrebos shows why embodied trajectories must remain capable of producing knowledge that escapes preformatted categories. This implies a layered field method. A location can be observed simultaneously as geographic coordinate, remembered site, algorithmically represented node, contested civic archive and affective passage. A person can appear as narrator, platform profile, statistical double, occupational performance and embodied walker without any one register claiming ontological priority. Comparability then moves from identities to operations: locating, ranking, mapping, remembering, moderating, walking, recognising, withholding, linking and reclassifying. The same operation can be studied across technical and spatial systems, exposing where apparently neutral acts of indexing become political decisions. This is particularly useful for longitudinal work because addresses mutate: platforms close, metadata standards change, neighbourhoods are rebuilt, names are replaced, memories migrate and identities are reorganised by new audiences. A durable Socioplastics archive would therefore preserve not only content but the history of how content became addressable, including the interfaces, categories, protocols and spatial situations that made retrieval possible at a given moment. Such an archive would not seek perfect legibility. It would keep room for the contradiction identified by Peters and Bengtsson and for the situated excess registered by walking practice, maintaining the difference between what a system can address and what a subject or place can become. Within Socioplastics, this tension condenses as Relational Agency.
Anto Lloveras is an architect and urban researcher whose work connects spatial practice, epistemology, archives, infrastructures and comparative fieldwork through LAPIEZA LAB and Socioplastics.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
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