Socioplastics 11831 Copying across Contexts
A document can arrive intact while losing the conditions that made it meaningful. CopyStress [11057] studies what happens when documents, procedures and artworks move across platforms or institutions. A curator emails an exhibition instruction to a library: the words remain exact, while lighting, permissions and visitor-response systems differ. The copy’s new setting gives it new capacities and responsibilities. Lisa Gitelman’s history of documents shows how formats and institutions shape what records can do. Matthew Kirschenbaum’s account of digital materiality makes the technical conditions of files part of their history. Together, they direct attention to the specific relations carried by a copy: provenance, version, consent, instructions and expected use. A checklist may function as advice in one office and as a binding requirement in another; an image may circulate beyond the permissions that first governed it. A study could transfer one exhibition score to a gallery, a public library and an outdoor square. For each setting, it would record what remains essential, what can be adapted, which permissions travel and what new capacities are required. The receiving institution would document its interpretation and the decisions that permit a new use. Comparing these transfers would show where contextual change calls for revision and where the document remains fit for purpose. CopyStress gives copying a practical history. It supports circulation while making the conditions of use legible to authors, custodians and recipients. The central measure is how carefully a copy connects its inherited instructions with the obligations of its new setting. A transfer record can preserve source, version, permissions and adaptation decisions, allowing later readers to understand how the document’s function changed across settings.
REFERENCES
Gitelman, L. (2014) Paper Knowledge: Toward a Media History of Documents. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Kirschenbaum, M.G. (2008) Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
CITE AS
Lloveras, A. (2026) Socioplastics, LAPIEZA-LAB, Madrid.
https://antolloveras.blogspot.com/p/socioplastics-project-index.html