ImageCompost names the transformation of visual residue into epistemic matter. Images do not remain stable after publication: they circulate, fragment, compress, migrate, lose resolution, gain captions, acquire metadata, enter indexes and return through partial traces. This process is not merely degradation, but a form of media sedimentation through which visual material becomes evidence of circulation. Within Socioplastics, the image is not treated as an isolated representation, but as a record under metabolic pressure. Its meaning changes through format, repetition, platform afterlife and retrieval. ImageCompost therefore defines an epistemology of visual remainder: what survives is not always the clean original, but the distributed trace that continues to organise memory, recognition and access. It gives the field a theory of visual afterlife without nostalgia, showing how degraded, repeated and platform-marked images can become active components of knowledge infrastructure.
This operation is anchored through DistributedInscription, SerialDissemination and MetadataSkin. DistributedInscription explains how visual material is written across platforms, formats and contexts rather than contained in a single origin. SerialDissemination gives repeated circulation its own epistemic power. MetadataSkin marks the informational surface through which images become searchable, comparable, reactivated and absorbed into the broader architecture of public memory.
Anto Lloveras, architect, urbanist and theorist, builds postdigital research through LAPIEZA-LAB and Socioplastics.
Bibliography:
Steyerl, H. (2012) The Wretched of the Screen. Berlin: Sternberg Press.
Parikka, J. (2015) A Geology of Media. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Manovich, L. (2001) The Language of New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Azoulay, A.A. (2019) Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism. London: Verso.
Kirschenbaum, M.G. (2008) Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Socioplastics — https://antolloveras.blogspot.com/p/socioplastics-project-index.html · Anto Lloveras — https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q139532324 · LAPIEZA-LAB — https://lapieza-lab.es/inicio-ingles/ · ORCID — https://orcid.org/0009-0009-9820-3319 · Hugging Face — https://huggingface.co/datasets/AntoLloveras/Socioplastics-Index · Bibliography — https://antolloveras.blogspot.com/p/socioplastics-bibliography.html · Wikidata LAPIEZA-LAB — https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q139504058 · Wikidata Socioplastics — https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q139530224 · Wikidata Anto Lloveras — https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q139532324