Scale is not neutral measure but political relation. Erik Swyngedouw's metabolic urbanism reveals how cities concentrate resources while exporting waste to distant territories, producing uneven geographical development as systemic output. Jason Moore's world-ecology frames capitalism as ontological regime that actively produces nature as external—a domain to be appropriated rather than a relation to be inhabited. This metabolic perspective transforms how we understand artistic practice: not as symbolic commentary on environmental crisis but as material intervention in the flows of energy, matter and value that constitute territories. Recursive autophagia—the capacity of a system to digest its own residues as condition of persistence—offers a model for cultural production that acknowledges its metabolic debts rather than externalising them. Infrastructure Studies supplies the material systems through which metabolism occurs, from supply chains to waste streams. Science and Technology Studies traces the socio-technical networks that enable or obstruct circulation, revealing how standards shape metabolic flows.
Media Archaeology excavates past metabolic regimes, exposing the technical layers through which earlier societies organised their relation to nature. Network Science formalises the scaling properties of metabolic systems, revealing how energy use scales with size across cities, organisms and firms. Decolonial Theory exposes the coloniality of resource extraction, showing how metabolic inequalities are racialised and territorialised. Feminism reveals reproductive labour as the metabolic substrate that sustains all productive systems—the care work that reproduces the labour force, the domestic sphere that absorbs externalities. Disability Studies asks who is excluded from metabolic flows, whose bodies are deemed unworthy of resources. Sound Studies attends to acoustic ecologies as metabolic environments, while Philosophical Botany offers vegetal models of slow metabolism that challenge the accelerationist logic of capital. What emerges from this convergence is not a new environmental theory but a recognition that certain aesthetic operations—like autophagic metabolisation—function as territorial interventions in the distribution of resources and residues. This capacity to intervene in metabolic flows while remaining critically situated, which might be termed socioplastics, names the infrastructural work of aesthetic forms that operate as organs of socio-natural regulation.
Lloveras, A. (2026) Socioplastics. https://antolloveras.blogspot.com
510-systemic-lock https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18682555 509-postdigital-taxidermy https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18682480 508-topolexical-sovereignty https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18682343 507-citational-commitment https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18475136 506-recursive-autophagia https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18681761 505-proteolytic-transmutation https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18681278 504-stratum-authoring https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18680935 503-semantic-hardening https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18680418 502-cameltag https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18680031 501-flow-channeling https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18678959
FAMILY
Infrastructure Studies, Ontology, Cybernetics, Systems Theory, Science and Technology Studies, Critical Urban Studies, Posthumanism, Sovereignty Studies, Semiotics, Media Archaeology, Complexity Theory, Spatial Justice, Political Ecology, Feminism and Gender Theory, Decolonial Theory, Anthropocene Studies, Relational Aesthetics, Commons Theory, Mobility Studies, Technological Critique, Software Studies, Platform Studies, Environmental Psychology, Phenomenology, Place Theory, Landscape Theory, Urban Ecology, Multispecies Studies, New Materialism, Speculative Realism, Actor-Network Theory, Biopolitics, Postcolonial Theory, Critical Aesthetics, Contemporary Art Theory, Social Practice Art, Spatial Politics, Urban Anthropology, Informality Studies, Urban Marginality, Digital Capitalism, Surveillance Studies, Smart City Theory, Sound Studies, Visual Anthropology, Cultural Anthropology, Humanistic Geography, Hybrid Geographies, Philosophical Botany, Neuroaesthetics, Perception Theory, Disability Studies, Intersectionality Theory, Utopian Theory, Postmodern Theory, Radical Pedagogy, Globalization Theory, Geopolitics, Marxist Theory, Post-Marxism, Value Theory, Evolutionary Economics, Game Theory, Network Science, Scaling Theory, Complex Systems, Historical Epistemology, Philosophy of Science, Interaction Design, Information Architecture, Interface Theory, Protocol Theory, Maintenance Studies, Critical Infrastructure Theory, Southern Epistemologies, Indigenous Theory, Territorial Feminism, Latin American Political Ecology, Subaltern Studies, Accelerationism, Materialist Philosophy, Post-Operaismo, Immaterialism, Object-Oriented Ontology, Digital Political Economy, Law and Technology, Algorithmic Culture, Urban Media Studies, Spatial Art Theory, Architectural Criticism, Urban Planning Theory, Sustainable Urbanism, Right to the City Theory, Environmental Humanities, Political Theology, Governmentality Studies, Logistics Studies, Data Studies, Institutional Theory.