Socioplastics 11841 The Document’s Afterlife
A document can shape decisions long after the event it records. It may support a legal claim, direct a restoration or fix a public description of a person. VibrantRecord examines this material afterlife through the arrangements that reproduce, store and consult documents. A photograph or database has no intention of its own; its circulation within institutions can still produce lasting effects. Jane Bennett’s political ecology of things attends to material relations. Johanna Drucker studies visual forms as producers of knowledge, while Tina Campt examines how images can be read and heard. N. Katherine Hayles explores relations among bodies, media and technical systems. Their work helps explain how records gain force through formats, custody, repetition and use. A document can direct attention differently as it moves from an archive to a court, exhibition or planning office. A study could follow one record through its creation, storage, reproduction and public use. At each stage, it would document who handled it, which version circulated and what decision it informed. The record would include material changes, permissions and interpretations attached by users. Comparing these passages would show how a document’s effects depend on the systems that give it authority. VibrantRecord describes documentary consequence with attention to material and institutional relations. It offers researchers a way to study how records shape public life while preserving a clear distinction between a document’s material effects and human intention. The study can also preserve how a record’s reproduction changes its audience and how that audience later uses it in new decisions.
REFERENCES
Bennett, J. (2010) Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Campt, T.M. (2017) Listening to Images. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Drucker, J. (2014) Graphesis: Visual Forms of Knowledge Production. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Hayles, N.K. (1999) How We Became Posthuman. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
CITE AS
Lloveras, A. (2026) Socioplastics, LAPIEZA-LAB, Madrid.
https://antolloveras.blogspot.com/p/socioplastics-project-index.html