Socioplastics 11940 The Rendering Has Already Made a Decision
A promotional rendering may show a waterfront as a seamless public landscape. Before construction, a municipality approves demolition, assigns subsidies and changes access rules to deliver the projected scene. FantasyControl identifies the conversion of an anticipated future into present authority. Its evidence is the traceable link between an image and a budget, permission, territorial reservation or unequal sacrifice. Shoshana Zuboff examines prediction and behavioural modification within digital capitalism. Benjamin Bratton analyses planetary computation as interacting infrastructural layers. Mark Fisher studies the cultural conditions through which particular futures appear possible or inevitable. Their work helps investigate how projections organise current decisions and how images gain force when institutions use them to justify action. A waterfront project could be studied by pairing each rendering with the approvals, land transfers, budgets and access changes associated with it. Researchers would record when the image entered decision-making, which groups were represented and what alternative futures were considered. Residents’ accounts could show how the promise of a future landscape shaped present experience and whose needs were deferred. FantasyControl makes projected futures available for institutional review. It asks what present decisions an image authorises and how those decisions distribute access, cost and risk. The marker directs analysis toward the chain between representation and action. By documenting that chain, researchers can assess how visual promises govern territory before the proposed environment exists. The record can inform public review by making assumptions in the rendering comparable with the permissions and material changes it enabled. This supports scrutiny before later phases reproduce the same projected image as an established fact.
REFERENCES
Bratton, B.H. (2015) The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Fisher, M. (2009) Capitalist Realism. Winchester: Zero Books.
Zuboff, S. (2019) The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. New York: PublicAffairs.
CITE AS
Lloveras, A. (2026) Socioplastics, LAPIEZA-LAB, Madrid.
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