The MPIWG Research Report 2018–2020 presents the history of science not as a narrow study of past discoveries, but as an inquiry into the systems of knowledge through which societies organise, transmit and transform understanding. Its central emphasis is historical epistemology: the study of how knowledge practices emerge within specific cultural, material, institutional and technological conditions. The report shows that science cannot be separated from the infrastructures that sustain it, whether libraries, archives, laboratories, digital tools, research groups or international collaborations. This is especially evident in the Institute’s work on the Anthropocene, where science and technology are treated as historical forces that have helped produce the modern technosphere while also supplying the tools needed to diagnose planetary crisis. The case of Department I illustrates this approach clearly: its research links ancient measurement, early modern knowledge circulation, industrial energy systems and Earth system science into a long history of interaction between knowledge and material power. Digital humanities methods, including network analysis and machine learning, further demonstrate how contemporary historical research increasingly depends on computational infrastructures. Yet the report also suggests that such tools are not neutral: they reshape the questions historians ask and the scales at which knowledge can be analysed. Ultimately, the MPIWG’s work argues that understanding science historically is essential for understanding the present, because today’s crises—climate change, inequality, digitalisation and public distrust in science—are also crises in the organisation, legitimacy and circulation of knowledge.
Mounier, P. and Dumas Primbault, S. (2023) Sustaining Knowledge and Governing its Infrastructure in the Digital Age: An Integrated View. HAL preprint. Available at: HAL, hal-04309735.
Knowledge infrastructures are not merely technical supports; they are sociotechnical configurations that shape how knowledge is produced, circulated, preserved and legitimised. Mounier and Dumas Primbault argue that digitalisation has made visible what often remained in the background: networks, platforms, archives, standards, protocols, institutions and human practices that enable contemporary research. Their central claim is that such infrastructures should not be understood as neutral tools, since they embed values, hierarchies and forms of power. Open access, for instance, depends on repositories, identifiers, indexing services and funding models that determine who can publish, consult or reuse knowledge. The case of open science reveals this tension clearly: although it promises to democratise knowledge, it also requires sustainable governance systems capable of resisting commercial capture, technical exclusion and dependence on private platforms. In this sense, infrastructure becomes a space of negotiation among researchers, institutions, funders, technicians and diverse publics. Its apparent stability conceals permanent fragility, because it requires maintenance, legitimacy, resources and continuous adaptation. Therefore, governing knowledge infrastructures involves far more than administering technology: it means deciding which forms of knowledge count, who participates in their circulation, and under what conditions the epistemic common good can be sustained.
Wendell, S. (1996) The Rejected Body: Feminist Philosophical Reflections on Disability. New York and London: Routledge.
Susan Wendell’s The Rejected Body reframes disability not as a merely biomedical condition but as a socially mediated experience produced through the interaction of bodily variation, institutional design, cultural expectation and political recognition. Her argument is especially powerful because it refuses the simplification that disability resides only in the impaired body. Instead, Wendell shows that definitions of disability determine access to material support, public services, legal recognition and social legitimacy; they also shape whether friends, families and workplaces acknowledge a person’s lived reality. This is crucial for people with chronic illness or non-visible disability, whose suffering may be doubted precisely because it does not conform to dominant stereotypes of disability. Wendell’s own account of myalgic encephalomyelitis demonstrates how illness can become disabling not only through pain, exhaustion and bodily limitation, but through scepticism, guilt, inaccessible norms of productivity and the demand to appear “normal” within able-bodied social worlds. Her feminist intervention lies in exposing how ideals of autonomy, bodily control and self-sacrifice obscure dependence as a universal human condition. A society organised around the young, healthy, independent body inevitably marginalises those who move, work, rest or communicate differently. Consequently, disability studies must challenge both physical barriers and epistemic ones: the refusal to believe disabled people’s testimony about their own bodies. Wendell’s central contribution is therefore ethical as well as political: she asks readers to replace pity or suspicion with recognition, and to understand disability as a site of knowledge capable of transforming feminist theory, medical authority and social justice.
Socioplastics operates as designed infrastructure for knowledge: four thousand nodes organized through decadic hierarchy (ten Nodes per Tail, ten Tails per Pack, ten Packs per Tome). This fractal logic ensures scale is specified, not accidental. The project demonstrates that fields can be engineered rather than emerged—that persistence, circulation, and collective intelligibility depend on deliberate architectural choice. For future scientists and artists, it offers an alternative: infrastructure independent of institutional gatekeeping, built through sustained work across years, structured for durability and citation within research networks.
A field requires coherence at scale. Traditional fields (sociology, literature, physics) achieve this through institutional consolidation—departments, journals, credential systems that determine what counts as legitimate contribution. Socioplastics proposes a different mechanism: internal structure so explicit and intentional that coherence emerges from design rather than institutional decree. The cores (Linguistic Operators, Conceptual Art Protocols, Epistemology, Systems Theory, Architecture, Urbanism, Media Theory, Morphogenesis, Dynamics) are not disciplinary categories. They are load-bearing structures that cut transversally through accumulated nodes, making visible different patterns of relation. Each core supports specific weight; each operates at specific intensity. A researcher navigating the field can enter through any core, trace patterns unique to that register, then discover how those patterns connect to others. The structure enables rather than constrains access. Luhmann's Zettelkasten generates complexity through organic accumulation and recursive linkage. Its genius is adaptability; its limitation is contingency—it depends entirely on the originator's knowledge of its own topology. Socioplastics inverts this. It imposes structure a priori: Node, Pack, Tome, Field. This is not hierarchy as domination but as legibility. A thousand nodes cannot be navigated without architecture. The Tomes mark thresholds of organization where accumulation becomes topology. Tome I establishes nodal form and vocabulary. Tome II develops and consolidates. Tome III expands into adjacent territories. The distinction matters philosophically: it means the system itself teaches how to read it. Each threshold requires different competencies, different scales of attention. This is designing for transmissibility—making the system comprehensible to others, not just its creator.
Online comparison supports the idea that Socioplastics @ LAPIEZA-LAB belongs near independent field-making infrastructures. The closest families are platforms that combine archive, vocabulary, research, publication, and public legibility.
Socioplastics @ LAPIEZA-LAB belongs to the lineage of independent field-makers: not conventional institutions, not simple archives, but distributed systems that build their own vocabulary, public surface, and conditions of legibility. Its closest companions are figures and operations such as Bruno Latour, Donna Haraway, Constant, Aby Warburg, Cedric Price, Forensic Architecture, e-flux, and complexity laboratories: each of them created more than content; they produced a grammar, an archive, a method, and a way of seeing. In this sense, Anto Lloveras works as architect-writer, Socioplastics as field and framework, and LAPIEZA-LAB as publisher, think tank, and para-university. Across 11 channels, almost 21,000 posts, and around 3.6 million views, the project has moved from dispersed cultural memory to structured field architecture. Its blogs are not duplicated surfaces but differentiated organs: art archive, urban laboratory, ecological garden, media layer, political layer, museum layer, workshop, vocabulary machine, and theoretical index. The comparison with Latour or Haraway is not a claim of equivalence, but a question of operational family: independence, conceptual invention, distributed publication, long-term archive, and the capacity to turn accumulated work into a legible field.
The central problem of digital knowledge is not information scarcity but the false equivalence between size and value. Large repositories, expanding datasets and proliferating publications do not automatically produce knowledge; without form, they remain heaps rather than bodies. Anto Lloveras’s Socioplastics offers a decisive inversion: size does not produce form; form produces the conditions under which size becomes meaningful. The essay develops this idea through the distinction between accumulation and articulation, showing how a corpus becomes inhabitable only when its parts acquire position, recurrence, scale and density. Its key innovation lies in Scalar Grammar, where notes, clusters, books, tomes and cores operate as nested levels of orientation, and in differential speed, where hardened nuclei remain stable enough to be cited while plastic peripheries remain open enough to mutate, absorb and invent. Novelty is therefore not rupture, novelty content or mere recombination; it is the moment when a concept crosses a grammatical threshold and becomes an operator within a living architecture. Socioplastics appears here as a method for transforming abundance into form: a system capable of growing without collapsing, changing without dissolving and remaining legible after exceeding ordinary reading.
Soft Ontology Console
Socioplastics is a field built in a lab and released as public space. Architecture, epistemology, urban theory, systems thinking, media theory, conceptual art — treated as one epistemic infrastructure. This page is the console. Pick a key. Each opens a different room.
▦ Soft Ontology Papers · 3201–3210Didactical Invitations into the Field * SOCIOPLASTICS — Threshold Texts * Anto Lloveras · LAPIEZA-LAB · 2026
01 · FlowChanneling
02 · SemanticHardening
03 · StratumAuthoring
04 · ScalarArchitecture
05 · RecursiveAutophagia
06 · CitationalCommitment
07 · CamelTagInfrastructure
08 · FieldGravity
09 · EpistemicLatency
10 · ExecutiveMode
Lloveras, A. (2026) Socioplastics — Didactical Invitations into the Field. LAPIEZA-LAB, Madrid. Available at: https://antolloveras.blogspot.com/p/socioplastics-project-index.html