Metabolic Infrastructures

 

Artificial intelligence is not an autonomous intelligence hovering above material reality; it is a political metabolism that converts energy, land, labour, cultural expression and institutional trust into computational capacity. Data centres expose this dependence by placing model expansion within regional struggles over electricity, emissions and public infrastructure, while data feminism reveals that datasets, classifications and labour arrangements already embody structural power. Copyright disputes likewise demonstrate that training is not a singular act but a sequence of acquisition, copying, curation, memorisation and retrieval whose legitimacy depends upon purpose, provenance and market consequence. Within Socioplastics, these conditions require the corpus to be conceived not as an immaterial archive but as a cultural commons sustained by inspectable gateways between sources, machines and publics. A meaningful node must retain durable identity, permissions, contextual density and intellectual lineage as it migrates across repositories and interfaces. Persistent identifiers, interoperable formats, redundant storage, licensing statements and concise metadata therefore constitute ethical as well as technical devices. For example, an index may enhance discoverability while suppressing alternative relations; similarly, an API may widen access yet privilege computationally equipped actors. The project’s fifteen-year installed base of posts, exhibitions, images and institutional experiments provides a decisive case study: reactivation must preserve temporal and authorial difference rather than flatten heterogeneous materials into anonymous training feedstock. CitationalCommitment consequently names an infrastructural obligation to keep every transformation—from source to concept, operator, index and circulation—attached to its origins. By joining machine legibility to human contestability, Socioplastics establishes a counter-model in which scale becomes negotiable stewardship rather than concealed dispossession.

LAPIEZA reframes resistance through accumulation, reuse and participatory art as an open civic hypertext in Madrid.Open-Source Commons

Aesthetics of Resistance (2009–2024) defines LAPIEZA as a relational counter-model to the hermetic, market-oriented conventions frequently associated with contemporary art. Situated in Madrid, the project rejects the gallery as an ivory tower and instead constructs a mutable environment where accumulation, reuse, unfinishedness and participation operate as critical languages. Its resistance is not merely thematic but procedural: DIY finishes oppose elitist design, recycled materials contest planned obsolescence, and work-in-progress formats undermine the commodity logic of the completed object. The case study of LAPIEZA’s cumulative installation reveals a gigantic hypertext, in which performances, socio-plastic actions, neighbourhood relations and open-source cultural protocols remain continuously available for reinterpretation. Through this framework, resistance becomes neither negation nor spectacle, but an epistemic practice of reconnecting signs prematurely discarded by hegemonic systems. Ultimately, LAPIEZA proposes art as civic renegotiation: a shared apparatus for democratising creativity, extending meaning, and reconstructing the commons through unstable, participatory form. Lloveras, A. (2024) ‘AESTHETICS OF RESISTANCE__________LAPIEZA ART SERIES________2009:2024’, Socioplastics, 2 July. Available at: https://antolloveras.blogspot.com/2023/07/aesthetics-of-resistancelapieza-art.html(Accessed: 26 April 2026).