From artificial to artefactual wisdom: governing territorial polyrhythmy

Abstract

This article proposes a conceptual grammar for governing the heterogeneous temporalities that coexist within a territory without ever unifying. We argue that contemporary algorithmic infrastructures (adaptive traffic systems, logistics platforms, predictive analytics) share an architectural commitment they cannot govern: they operate according to a dominant logic derived from Aristotle’s excluded third, treating contradictions as problems to be resolved through eliminating one of their terms. The governance of territorial polyrhythmy requires a different architecture. Our central contribution is a grammar for qualifying territorial temporal antagonisms, not a critique of the smart city paradigm alone. Drawing on Simondon’s metastability (1958), Stengers’s ecology of practices (2005), and Lupasco’s logic of the included third (1951), we propose three conceptual displacements: from excluded to included third, from problem-solving to antagonism governance, and from measurement to evaluation. These displacements give rise to what we call ArtefactKairos: technical devices oriented toward the composition of heterogeneous temporalities rather than the compression of time. Engaging the conversation on artificial wisdom opened in this journal (Casacuberta 2013; Tsai 2020; Sinha and Lakhanpal 2023) and extended beyond it (McGregor 2025; Chella 2025), we argue that wisdom can be understood as a systemic property of territorial governance, an idea not yet addressed by the existing literature. Building on the Aristotelian distinction between sophia and phronesis, and on Dreyfus’s account of embodied judgement, we displace wisdom from the individual to the territorial register and from the contemplative to the compositional. The wisdom at stake is artefactual rather than artificial in the agentive sense: it has no existence outside the technical mediations through which polyrhythmic antagonisms become perceptible, nameable, and governable. The article introduces the Tempobloc as an elementary unit of polyrhythmic analysis and the Tic-Tac Gears, an exploratory governance grammar whose seven spatial forms and seven temporal colours generate forty-nine configurations for qualifying territorial antagonisms. The Algo-Geriato antagonism between algorithmic acceleration and demographic deceleration, explored through the case of a Montreal intersection, serves as a paradigmatic example. The framework is theoretical: it specifies three concrete design shifts (from optimization to composition, from prediction to qualification, from measurement to evaluation) that may precede and orient technical implementation, while acknowledging that the economic matrix of acceleration lies beyond its current scope and constitutes its necessary complement.