Media are not neutral conduits but sedimented histories. Friedrich Kittler showed that technical media determine the conditions of possibility for culture—what can be stored, transmitted and processed—long before any content is inscribed. Jussi Parikka excavates the geological layers of technological hardware, revealing how mineral extraction, manufacturing protocols and e-waste flows constitute the material unconscious of digital culture. This archaeological gaze transforms how we understand aesthetic production: not as creation ex nihilo but as working with and against the grain of inherited technical strata. Stratum authoring, in this context, names the practice of making visible the layers that condition contemporary expression—excavating forgotten protocols, reactivating obsolete formats, exposing the material debts that infrastructure conceals. Infrastructure Studies supplies the analytical frame for understanding these material systems as operative substrates, while Science and Technology Studies traces the socio-technical assemblages that crystallise around each technical layer.

Political Ecology connects technical strata to environmental extraction, revealing how every medium carries metabolic costs distributed unevenly across territories and populations. Network Science exposes the topological patterns that persist across media change—the structural invariants that survive technological revolution. Decolonial Theory excavates the Western bias sedimented into technical standards, revealing how protocols carry epistemic violence. Feminism uncovers the gendered labour concealed within media production and maintenance, from factory floors to server farms. Disability Studies asks who is excluded by the interface assumptions baked into each technical layer, while Sound Studies attends to the acoustic strata that visual media archaeology misses. Philosophical Botany offers vegetal time as alternative to technical acceleration, proposing models of persistence through latency and germination rather than speed and obsolescence. What emerges from this convergence is not a new history of media but a recognition that certain aesthetic practices—like stratum authoring—operate as archaeological interventions in the present. This capacity to work with temporal density while remaining critically situated, which might be termed socioplastics, names the infrastructural work of aesthetic forms that excavate as they construct.

Lloveras, A. (2026) Socioplastics. https://antolloveras.blogspot.com

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.

The logic of stratum authoring