On Architectural Metabolism: Archiving, Contamination, and the Speculative Double.

All right, we’re recording. Let me start by giving a bit of context. This conversation is part of Speculative Urban Futures, or SUrF, an Erasmus+ programme I’m involved in. SUrF explores speculation as an epistemic practice that challenges contemporary urban and architectural realities. About two months ago, we ran a design studio in Naples which led to a workshop titled SII, Sensing, Intuitive Imagining. The workshop was conceptually grounded in Gilbert Simondon’s Imagination and Invention (2022), where he examines how novelty emerges through an imagistic loop involving the dynamic interaction of motor, perceptual and symbolic images that together generate new forms, object-images. In our work, this framework evolved into a method for exploring how invention can emerge through processes of embodied speculation.

I wanted to bring some of these questions into conversation with your work, particularly your writing on the concept of general metabolics. In your article Architectures of Thought: Negentropy, Metabolics and the General Ephemeral (2022), published in Footprint Issue 30, you write that we can’t think about the genetic without also thinking about the metabolic. So, what if speculation, or more broadly imagination, can be itself reimagined as a metabolic process; something that breaks things down, processes them, keeps what can be sustained, to eventually resynthesise them and discards the rest? Not just creative, to say, but also selective. I would like to hear how you relate these ideas to your thinking on life, structure, and transformation.

Well, I think the relationship between the genetic and the metabolic has its correlates in other polarities in the history of metaphysics, for example, structure and genesis in Derrida, and similar kinds of tensions between, say, structuralism and post-structuralism. These often revolve around what destabilises an established order. I wanted to shift into this register precisely because of a certain concern with life. The argument in that particular essay is, of course, somewhat limited, as it focuses on Stiegler’s own project and the way he tends to think in structural terms. There’s a difficulty, then, in understanding what exists outside the creation of those noetic, and also technological, structures. How can you transform the very foundation on which something rests?

This is where ecological thinking becomes interesting. Many ecological approaches see this notion of niche creation as central to understanding evolution. The article asks: how do we think simultaneously about the techno-noetic evolution of ourselves and our societies? If you look to ecology, the question becomes: how do ecosystems and species evolve in tandem?

The traditional Darwinian account emphasises competition between species. But part of that competition involves a species transforming its environment in a way that offers it an advantage over others. If a species can reshape its niche such that only it can exploit it over others competing for similar resources, then it gains a competitive edge. So, how does a species do that? Here we move away from the Stieglerian model of tertiary retention, which non-human species supposedly do not possess. What you find instead is metabolism.

Interestingly, this was less acknowledged in the past, but it's now gaining traction. Darwin himself, later in his career, spent nearly 20 years studying worms, how they transform soil. The soil we cultivate today is, in many ways, a byproduct of worm metabolism. Without that digestion and transformation, agriculture as we know it wouldn’t be possible. I bring this up because in agriculture, soil is often treated as a neutral, permanent substrate, an absolute given. But ecologists know otherwise. One of the primary indicators of soil health is, in fact, the presence of worms. Again, this highlights how niche formation happens through metabolic processes. I wanted to make this very clear in biological terms: life literally ingests its environment and, well, defecates it, transforming it in the process.

In architecture, this becomes especially interesting. Buildings are seen as some of the most durable, robust objects. Obviously, we can’t just eat up a building. But there are other processes, less literal, through which transformation occurs. That’s something I try to explore, thinking of the architectonic not only in terms of the built environment, but more broadly, say, in the Kantian sense, as the architectonic of reason.

I’ve been thinking about this as an evaluation process of what can be kept in relation, what can be reshaped, and what can simply be allowed to dissolve. It involves a kind of selection that seems closely connected to the practice of archiving. Archiving is also selective as a process; it involves evaluating what is worth preserving and what is excluded, and through that, it actively shapes meaning. How is such a process part of your work? Is evaluation more than just a filtering mechanism in your view, and how do you see it actively participating in the construction of meaning within the archive?

This is interesting; I haven’t thought about it in those terms, but you’re right. I think, first of all, I’m very interested in notions of errancy and also ignorance. And it’s important to say: we shouldn’t romanticise metabolism. It’s a very violent practice, right?

And it's fascinating. If we think literally, in terms of food and practices of eating ‘well,’ there are many reasons people choose, say, to avoid meat. Some do it out of compassion for the suffering of animals. Others are motivated by more abstract reasons, concern for the environment, for ecosystem equilibrium, and so on. Eating meat is damaging in a systemic sense. But for many people, it's a visceral issue—and it’s very difficult to argue with that, in either direction. Perhaps it requires something like an education of the senses. But when we talk about metabolism, it's not as if it's a perfectly wise or balanced process. It errs. You might eat something that kills you. Even now, hundreds of people die each year from eating poisonous mushrooms, despite all our knowledge. Animals, too, sometimes they eat things they cannot digest, like frogs that eat other frogs, which are bigger than themselves. It’s a misjudgment. And then the question becomes: what’s at the other end of metabolism? What do you do with what has been metabolised? Do we want archives that also ingest and digest cultural formations and experiences?

I’m not sure. I think Serres says somewhere that if you want a soup to be yours, you spit in it; that way, no one else will touch it. There’s this idea of contamination. So, imagine how much more violent and appropriative metabolism is, if no one will touch the food you've spat into, who will touch the food you've already digested? And yet we do have these processes. Often, our only access to originary moments is through relays of metabolism, through layers of transformation. Let’s also not forget that what is excrement for one organism is food for another. There are historic relays of metabolism.

So yes, I do think that archives function this way too. As you can see, I’m a little hesitant when it comes to the question of value, because that introduces another register altogether. But I don't want to evade the question. What I would say is this: the things we value are not always aligned with our metabolism.

I see, but when you archive something, you're already changing it, right? Archiving is never neutral; It shifts the value of what’s archived, or at least alters how it functions. It doesn’t just preserve; it transforms; it mutates. I think of it as metabolic in nature, at times cruel, as you mentioned. That’s what I mean when I use the word evaluation. Less of a measured act of judgment, formal or institutionalised, than a kind of motor action, an intuitive response towards maintaining systemic coherence.

Then evaluation becomes a kind of classification; An ongoing negotiation of an organisational framework that stretches and distorts under pressure, yet remains necessary to keep a system together. So, for me, it’s a way of asking how we metabolise meaning. But I understand the hesitation around the term.

Yes, especially when we're talking about archiving. And again, I completely agree with you—through the act of archiving, we’re already imposing values. By not archiving something, we’re also enacting a certain kind of value. Of course, the idea of value itself is a very troubled notion. It would take us a long time...

I want to pick up on what you said about poisoning and contamination. It made me wonder, how can we think about the inclusion of a diseased body in an archive? In other words, how do we deal with contaminated data or compromised information? Is there a space in archival practice for intentionally working with such material? Can data be deliberately contaminated, as a way of testing, exposing, or even reconfiguring how errancy operates within a system?

Yes, that can take all sorts of forms. Archives are very familiar with data corruption across all kinds of media—from organic archives to paper archives, and, of course, to software archives. So corruption is one aspect. Another aspect is the capacity of an environment to decipher what has been preserved—according, perhaps, to certain guidelines established at the time the material entered the archive. As for the diseased body specifically, I’m not sure. It really depends on what we mean by ‘archive.’ For example, if we’re keeping records of entries into a hospital, then what would the diseased body be in that case? How do we even begin to think about that?

Yes, let’s think of an archive as a highly regulated system, structured, organised, and often operating through a reductive and accelerated mode of information processing. There are established criteria, and material either conforms or is excluded. Chronological archiving provides a clear example of such a framework, where linear temporality imposes an ordering logic.

Contamination, then, whether in the form of the diseased, the corrupted, or the anomalous, disrupts this structure. And at times, such disruption may be intentional. It may be enacted as a form of creative intervention. I’m aware that creative is the buzziest word I could use here, but still, it fits. I mean it in the sense of testing the limits of the archival system, of engaging with errancy, with error, with that which falls outside the bounds of established epistemic order.

So, we can imagine, and even though I’m not familiar with specific instances, we can suppose that when a cryogenic bank preserves an animal that has died from a specific disease, it also preserves the disease itself. Now, this isn’t something that is commonly done, because normally, when a cryogenic bank preserves an animal, it wants that animal to be healthy, precisely because the purpose is often to regenerate it or cross-breed it in the future.

However, this is where errancy enters the process. As I mentioned earlier, there have been many instances of corruption, where both animals and other kinds of artefacts become infested. That often leads to discarding the item, but it could, potentially, generate something new. It's rare, but it happens. The interesting thing is that people who archive, in general, tend to want to archive everything. Maximalism is an archival principle, I would say, even if it's not explicitly acknowledged. However, there are always very real constraints. Would we choose to archive a diseased body if we had access to a healthy one instead? And beyond that, how do we even define a diseased body? Is there really such a thing as a purely healthy body?

So, I think there's a desire to preserve everything, including disease, but other considerations intervene. And this is where the issue of value comes in. As you put it, in those ‘fastest’ terms, archives often end up prioritising a particular notion of health. That said, there are certainly archives of pathogens, archives of diseases. For example, the Wellcome Trust holds an extensive archive of medical artefacts, prosthetic limbs from amputations, for instance—as well as human remains, many of which are in some way diseased. These are part of the archive, but it’s an archive about disease, rather than one where the diseased body has simply made its way in as a norm. I want to give one last example, the notorious Agrippa (A Book of the Dead). This collaboration among writer William Gibson, artist Dennis Ashbaugh and publisher Kevin Begos Jr. resulted in a poem stored on a floppy disk which would self-encrypt after a single access. The disk was enshrined in a book which was designed to fade upon its first contact with light. The artefact as a whole posed immense challenges for archiving, because you couldn’t catalogue it in any stable way. The thing became unusable after a single use.

I suppose now, with media like Snapchat, we’re more familiar with this idea, even though the Agrippa project is incomparably more complex and nuanced. In any case, when this experiment was done, in 1992, it was quite novel. Archivists had to ask: how do you collect such an object? The solution offered by the makers of Agrippa was that each time the object would arrive in two copies – one to inspect for the purpose of knowing what is being catalogued and one to archive.  As you already realise, this leads to countless problems, the least of which may be that the archived object can only ever exit the archive at pain of never returning to it.

Often, when we archive something, we do so with the assumption that we’ll return to it at some later point. But the return is rarely to the same object in the same form. Sometimes we re-encounter it as a transformed version of itself, or through an interpretive lens shaped by the very process that led us to archive it in the first place; to classify, to stabilise, to impose a certain structure. In this recursive back-and-forth, this repetition, this iterative re-engagement, do you think variations begin to emerge? And within those variations, do you see the potential for novelty, or for speculation as a mode of engaging the archive differently?

So yes, of course, there is recursivity, if you like. And an archive is as much an archive of the things it contains as it is of its own archiving practices. That is definitely true. It’s interesting to follow those historical processes—to trace genealogies or forms of knowledge through their archival practices and their transformation. There’s definitely a pedagogy there, a pedagogy of archiving.

But again, what are its principles? I mentioned maximalism previously. There are many requirements that are very specific to our time. We spoke about values, but there are also ontological and epistemological presuppositions that we bring to it, expectations that shape how we understand the archive at any given moment. So, you could say that an archive speaks about its age and moreover, about its own histories of inscription. There are many examples of that. In terms of curation, for instance, contemporary museums often follow the white cube paradigm. But other curatorial approaches, newer ones, also emerge from specific archival histories. And at the same time, they reflect our present. In that sense, there’s a pedagogy to be drawn from them, about who we are now.

You know, one of the meanings of speculation is to look in the mirror, to reflect. So, in a way, we see ourselves reflected in the archive. We walk into the white cube, and we’re also looking at ourselves.

We talked about maximalism, which I understand as the idea that the larger the pool—the more the data, the more extensive the archive, the more reliable the representation is expected to be. There’s an underlying assumption that scale guarantees neutrality.

But this also carries a kind of, let me call it, illusion of objectivity, a belief that volume inherently guarantees validity. I’m interested in what happens when that process includes contamination, noise, or when the scale itself becomes unmanageable. What implications does that have for the future of archiving, not only in terms of archival processes, but also the infrastructures, devices, and platforms through which archives are constructed, maintained, and accessed?

That’s right. Well, platforms, probably platforms. Yes, this is a question that concerns me a lot. First of all, we should recognise that it’s not only a matter of numerical entries. It’s not necessarily about having more of one thing—in that sense, a larger sample. Of course, statistically, that can be important for generating predictions. But I find that maximalism operates first and foremost at the level of richness of information.

That means, rather than collecting just specific parts of something, the aim is to have almost everything about that thing. So, rather than collecting the silhouettes of a billion people, I might collect holograms of ten people. And that, perhaps, represents a greater quantity of information. It’s a quantitative difference that translates into a qualitative one. So, the question is: when does the archive become a simulation? The archive is maximalist in the sense that what it strives for is to recreate what is lost. And for that, it doesn’t necessarily need more instances. It doesn’t necessarily need more of anything. But it needs a single instance, if you like.

But again, the qualitative, it involves a process of evaluation when we talk about quality or qualitative differences.

Yes, and I think that because you asked about the future as well, one of the most interesting current developments is what is called the Digital Double. This is a technical kind of artefact that exists in many forms. The European Union has launched a multimillion-euro project to create Europe: The Earth’s Digital Double.

Digital doubles are meant to be models that effectively replicate a given thing by extracting the maximum possible information from it. They are increasingly used in a variety of fields, from medicine to industry. The idea originally comes from industrial production, but it has since been transferred to other domains. So, rather than creating a replica in order to build something repeatedly, the logic now is to begin with a double, a model that makes replication possible. But instead of working with artefactual objects we've designed, and for which we already have a blueprint, the idea is: what if we go and extract the blueprint from real things, and then replicate them as perfectly as possible?

This idea has countless instances across both the humanities and the sciences. Of course, it’s an illusion, information is infinite. But it’s fascinating to see how this logic is driving so much of what we do. And I think this is very much where we are heading. Again, it’s a strong example of what I’ve been calling the maximalism of the archive. So, let’s say you have a tractor that moves over a field. It scans each and every seed of rice, then tracks its development across its entire life cycle. What you end up with is a model that contains detailed knowledge of each individual seed, its humidity, condition, rate of development, temperature, monitoring its progress over time. And again, the idea is to continuously add to this pool of information, which becomes an archive. But then, of course, the question is: what happens to all that data? What happens to the data from that seed of rice after it has grown, produced rice, and then been consumed?

Yes, it seems that there is an impulse behind digital doubles, to collect everything, just in case, whether or not we ever use it again. And the question is for what purpose and for whom is this data really being kept?

I also really relate to that on a personal level. I’m very maximalist in how I archive, especially on my phone. I save pages, images, screenshots, sometimes I don’t even know why, and I almost never go back to them. So yes, I really relate to this accumulation of data that just... sits there. What do we make of that kind of archive, one we may never return to?

For whom, that is indeed the absolute tragedy. If you look at museums, what’s on display is always just the tip of the iceberg. In museum practice, the archive is precisely what is left outside the exhibition. Most contemporary museums have decided to continually revisit their archives for various reasons, and to mobilise them as much as possible.

In the past, the archive was much more inert. Again, this reflects our contemporary values. There was once a belief in an objective need to prioritise certain ‘great’ works of art over others. Works deemed less significant were therefore relegated to the archive. Nowadays, we tend to believe there is value in mobilising the archive itself.

And on that very interesting note, which opens up a whole new line of questioning around how we mobilise archival processes, I think it's a good moment to close our discussion.

Thank you so much for the conversation. It’s been a real pleasure. I think we’ve covered a lot!