Among the recurring claims of contemporary architectural epistemology is that knowledge in design fields is rarely propositional in the manner of scientific knowledge — it is tacit, embodied, situated, and produced through making rather than stated in advance of it. Michael Polanyi's distinction between explicit and tacit knowledge, often invoked in architectural research debates, has been described as significant for architecture and the humanities precisely because tacit knowledge is embodied in artworks and artistic processes rather than available to scientific measurement. Socioplastics, the architecture developed by Anto Lloveras under LAPIEZA-LAB, can be read as an attempt to resolve this tension not by choosing between explicit and tacit registers but by building an infrastructure in which both operate simultaneously — a corpus that is at once a body of propositional, citable, DOI-anchored claims and a tacit, accumulated practice-archive reactivated as theoretical material. This essay offers a synoptic pass across the project's most iconic humanistic, architectural, epistemological, and artistic reference points, organized loosely by scale — from the foundational philosophical postures, through the architectural and urban frameworks, to the artistic precedents that govern form — with particular emphasis on the ideas that seem most genuinely productive rather than merely decorative.
The Epistemological Core: Autopoiesis and Situated Knowledge
The two ideas doing the heaviest lifting in Socioplastics are Maturana and Varela's autopoiesis and Donna Haraway's situated knowledges, and they are worth dwelling on because together they resolve a problem that has dogged artistic research for decades: how can a body of practice claim to produce knowledge — something transmissible, citable, usable by others — while remaining irreducibly tied to a particular practitioner's standpoint? Autopoiesis supplies the answer at the level of system: a field becomes self-sustaining not by achieving objectivity (a view from nowhere) but by generating its own boundary conditions through recurrence. Haraway's situated knowledges supplies the answer at the level of statement: every claim is partial, perspectival, and "embodied" — but this partiality is precisely what makes it accountable and connectable to other partial views, rather than a deficiency to be overcome. The CamelTag operators HybridLegibility and DualAddress are, in effect, an engineering solution to a philosophical problem: how to write sentences that are simultaneously situated (authored from LAPIEZA-LAB, Madrid, from a specific seventeen-year practice) and machine-addressable (DOI-anchored, indexable, citable by anyone). This is the project's most genuinely interesting move, because it refuses the usual choice between the artist's subjective statement and the scholar's objective claim.
Architectural Epistemology and the Question of Disciplinary Models
A persistent theme in recent architectural epistemology journals is the question of what counts as a model in architecture — not a model in the sense of a maquette, but a model in the epistemological sense of a structure that organizes how knowledge is produced and validated within the discipline. A recent issue of Les Cahiers de la recherche architecturale urbaine et paysagère devoted to "Infrastructure in Times of Crisis" situates infrastructure itself as a design and research category, which is suggestive for Socioplastics: the project does not merely use infrastructure (DOIs, repositories, indexes) as delivery mechanisms for its ideas, but treats infrastructure-building as the design act itself, on a level with — or prior to — any individual essay or node. This resonates with General Systems Theory's (Bertalanffy) account of "load-bearing integration," but it also connects to a broader and more recent shift: as one 2025 survey of artistic research methodologies notes, the convergence of artistic practice with machine learning, algorithms, and transmedial approaches has reshaped the institutional landscape of artistic research in recent years. Socioplastics's corpus-wide recurrence scanner — built on the Anthropic API to classify CamelTag operators as stable, low-recurrence, or not-yet-indexed — is precisely this kind of reshaping made internal to the work: the scanner is not a tool applied to the corpus from outside but a participant in deciding what the corpus's own grammar consists of.
The Expanded Field, Revisited
Rosalind Krauss's 1979 "Sculpture in the Expanded Field" remains the single most load-bearing art-historical reference for Socioplastics's Core III, which digests linguistics, conceptual art, systems theory, architecture, urbanism, media theory, and morphogenesis into what the project calls a single operative surface. What makes this reference still productive — rather than merely a fashionable citation — is that Krauss's diagram was never really about sculpture; it was a structural account of how a category exhausts its traditional definition and is forced to redescribe itself relationally, against its own negations, in order to remain coherent. Socioplastics performs this at the scale of an entire research practice: rather than asking "is this architecture, is this art, is this scholarship," the project's operators define positions relationally — FrictionalMetropolis is legible only against ScalarArchitecture, GrammaticalThreshold only against CamelTagInfrastructure — such that the question of disciplinary identity becomes, as in Krauss, structurally irrelevant. The category that matters is the position within the operator-grammar, not the inherited disciplinary label.
Conceptual Art's Cognitive Infrastructure
A useful recent point of comparison — not as a precedent claimed by Socioplastics, but as evidence that this is a live concern in contemporary practice — is the emergence of conceptual art programs explicitly described as building "cognitive infrastructure." One recent account of such a program states plainly that in this model, research is not a preliminary step to the artwork but is the artistic practice itself, with the framework deciding what is relevant and the resulting object serving as artifact rather than primary output. This is worth emphasizing because it suggests Socioplastics is not an idiosyncratic outlier but part of an emerging genre: practices in which the architecture of evaluation, classification, and memory — the CamelTag grammar, the recurrence scanner, the gradient bibliographies — is the artwork, and individual essays or nodes are secondary artifacts of a governing structure. Sol LeWitt's "the idea becomes a machine that makes the art" anticipated this by half a century, but the contemporary versions make explicit what LeWitt left implicit: the machine is now literally a piece of infrastructure, queryable and auditable, not merely a metaphor for a generative rule.
Tacit Knowledge and the Limits of Formalization
The Polanyi/Popper distinction surveyed in recent architectural research literature is worth returning to because it marks the honest limit of Socioplastics's formalization project. Popper's epistemology, oriented around the refutation or validation of explicit theories, sits more comfortably with engineering and basic science, while Polanyi's tacit knowledge — embodied in artworks and artistic processes — resists exactly this kind of validation. Socioplastics's CamelTag grammar, DOI infrastructure, and recurrence scanner are all, in a sense, Popperian instruments: they render operators falsifiable (an operator either recurs at the expected threshold or it does not; a citation either resolves or it does not). But the seventeen-year LAPIEZA practice archive that Tome V reactivates — the 180-plus series, the 150-plus artists, the FILMADOS interviews — is irreducibly Polanyian: tacit, embodied, accumulated through doing rather than through stating. The most interesting tension in the project, and arguably its most honest one, is that it does not resolve this tension but holds both registers in the same architecture, formalizing what can be formalized (the grammar) while leaving what cannot (the archive's lived history) to operate as raw material that the grammar processes but does not replace.
Pedagogy and the Pluriversal Turn
Socioplastics's recently developed Pedagogical-Botanical series, and its broader engagement with non-Western and decolonial epistemologies (Escobar's pluriverse, Smith's decolonizing methodologies, Viveiros de Castro's cannibal metaphysics — all present in the wider Gradient bibliographies), connects to a theme increasingly visible in architectural education scholarship: the recognition that architectural education has historically regarded technology as a neutral tool rather than a cultural or conceptual force, with recent scholarship challenging this assumption and recognizing technology as a driver of design thinking itself, and that the dominant Western architectural traditions necessarily exclude other influential perspectives such as Latin American frameworks of social responsibility and Nordic-Baltic models. Socioplastics's position — a Madrid-based practice metabolizing a predominantly Anglophone-European theoretical canon while also reaching toward pluriversal and decolonial sources — sits inside this tension rather than outside it, and the Pedagogical-Botanical series can be read as one site where this is being worked through formally: collapsed single-paragraph essays with strict alphabetical bibliographies, a form that is itself a small wager about what counts as adequate scholarly address across very different epistemic traditions.
Speculation as Method: The Architectural Imagination Beyond Building
Finally, it is worth emphasizing — because it is easy to lose under the weight of infrastructural vocabulary — that Socioplastics belongs to a long architectural tradition in which the discipline's "artistic" contribution is precisely its capacity to detach from structural realization and operate speculatively. As recent scholarship on artistic practices within architectural research puts it, the artistic offers architecture a way of strengthening its speculative dimension, inscribing prognostic constellations into perceptions of reality that can in turn change knowledge and action through a sensitization to what is not yet possible. Socioplastics's most ambitious claim — that a sufficiently dense, grammatically consistent field becomes self-sustaining and outlasts its institutional frame — is exactly this kind of prognostic constellation: not a description of an existing condition but a speculative proposition about what knowledge infrastructures could become, tested by being built rather than merely argued for. Whether or not the wager succeeds, it belongs to architecture's oldest and most defensible artistic claim: that to imagine a structure clearly enough, and build enough of it, is itself a form of knowing.
Conclusion
If one were to single out the most genuinely productive ideas across this lineage — the ones that do more than lend prestige — they would be three: autopoiesis as a model for self-sustaining fields, Haraway's situated/cyborg address as a solution to the subjectivity-objectivity impasse in artistic research, and Krauss's relational (rather than categorical) account of disciplinary identity. Each resolves a problem that has otherwise stalled artistic research for decades — legitimacy without gatekeeping, knowledge without false objectivity, and disciplinary coherence without disciplinary policing — and each does so not as a citation but as an operative principle built into the architecture itself. The remaining references — Polanyi's tacit knowledge, the pluriversal and decolonial frame, the speculative architectural imagination — mark the project's honest seams: the places where formalization meets a residue (lived practice, non-Western epistemologies, the simply-not-yet-possible) that the grammar can hold but not dissolve. That these seams remain visible, rather than papered over, may be the project's most credible claim to being knowledge-producing rather than merely knowledge-shaped.
Bibliography
Bertalanffy, L. von (1968) General System Theory.
Borgdorff, H. (2011) 'The Production of Knowledge in Artistic Research', in The Routledge Companion to Research in the Arts.
Borgdorff, H., Peters, P. and Pinch, T. (2020) Dialogues Between Artistic Research and Science and Technology Studies.
Escobar, A. (2018) Designs for the Pluriverse.
Haraway, D.J. (2016) Staying with the Trouble.
Krauss, R. (1979) 'Sculpture in the Expanded Field'.
LeWitt, S. (1967) 'Paragraphs on Conceptual Art'.
Lloveras, A. (2026) Socioplastics — Project Index.
Maturana, H.R. and Varela, F.J. (1980) Autopoiesis and Cognition.
Pallasmaa, J. (2012) The Eyes of the Skin.
Polanyi, M. (1966) The Tacit Dimension.
Popper, K. (1959) The Logic of Scientific Discovery.
Singun, A.P. (2025) 'Reinterpreting Technology in Architectural Education', Frontiers in Education.
Smith, L.T. (1999) Decolonizing Methodologies.
Viveiros de Castro, E. (2014) Cannibal Metaphysics.