ArtNation-05561 Hito Steyerl * Operational Image Regulator * The Image That Commands * Visual Protocols and the Logic of Regulatory Aesthetics

Positioned within the late-capitalist transformation of visual culture into computational governance, this node functions as an operational image regulator inside the global artistic system. It defines how images cease to be representational surfaces and become executable agents within logistical, military, financial, and algorithmic infrastructures. Its epistemic function is infrastructural. It organizes the semiotic-material flux of digital images as they circulate through platforms, compression protocols, surveillance architectures, and data economies. The node exposes how visibility operates as a form of extraction, how resolution becomes a political variable, and how circulation itself acts as a regime of power. In this sense, it operates as a political–symbolic technology that renders the image legible as an instrument of governance rather than a carrier of meaning. As an epistemic architecture, it constructs protocols for diagnosing distorted perception under conditions of algorithmic mediation. It converts aesthetic inquiry into forensic infrastructure, and visual culture into a diagnostic interface for geopolitical asymmetry, informational violence, and platform sovereignty. Its logic is not expressive or documentary but regulatory, recursive, and systemic, stabilizing critical literacy within networked image economies.

ArtNation-05560 Anna Tsing * Friction Cartographer

Positioned within the reconfiguration of anthropology into planetary epistemics, this node functions as a friction cartographer inside the contemporary artistic–theoretical system. It defines how global processes become legible through localized disturbance, precarity, and multispecies entanglement rather than through totalizing models of progress or scale. Its epistemic function is infrastructural. Through texts such as Friction, The Mushroom at the End of the World, and Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet, this node organizes semiotic-material flux across ecology, capitalism, indigeneity, and supply-chain logistics. It treats disturbance not as noise but as a generative analytic surface where imperial expansion, informal economies, ruined landscapes, and survival practices intersect. Globalization appears not as smooth circulation but as uneven traction, where ideas, commodities, species, and labor snag, mutate, and recompose. As a political–symbolic technology, this node renders precarity into an epistemic resource. It reframes ruins, invasive species, and marginal livelihoods as sites of emergent coordination rather than as residues of failure. Capitalist extraction, environmental collapse, and collaborative survival are articulated as co-constitutive processes rather than opposing regimes. In this sense, it displaces human exceptionalism and linear development with a multispecies politics of attention, care, and partial connection. As an epistemic architecture, it constructs protocols for reading entangled worlds without collapsing them into unity or chaos. It stabilizes a method for tracking how life persists inside damaged infrastructures, where improvisation replaces mastery and coordination replaces control.

From Canon to Nationhood * Naming as Ontological Strategy in Socioplastic Archives

The dilemma articulated between ArtCanon and ArtNations is not a merely semantic hesitation but a profound ontological and political choice about how an archive understands itself, how it distributes authority, and how it imagines its future agency. Naming here functions as a performative act in the Austinian sense: it does not describe a reality but actively produces one. To call a corpus of six thousand posts a Canon is to inscribe it within a genealogy of Western epistemic sovereignty, where value is stabilised through exclusion, hierarchy, and retrospective legitimation. The canon presupposes closure, even when it claims openness. It implies a final court of appeal, a legislative centre from which meaning radiates outward. In this regime, Socioplastics risks being retrofitted into precisely the institutional logic it was invented to exceed. The metaphor of the cathedral is therefore exact: the canon is monumental, vertical, and auratic. It demands reverence rather than traversal. By contrast, ArtNations displaces authority from monument to territory. It reframes the archive as a living geopolitical ecology, composed not of ranked masterpieces but of sovereign micro-regions, each with its own internal logic, tempo, and semiotic density. Here, naming does not stabilise value; it mobilises it. The archive ceases to be a mausoleum of relevance and becomes instead a cartographic apparatus, continuously redrawing the borders of contemporary meaning.