Before the Second Jump
Marco Fasoli’s “super-artifacts” and a prior use of the term
SuperArtifact.si provenance note · 2026
The word super-artifact did not begin here.
In 2018, philosopher Marco Fasoli published “Super Artifacts: Personal Devices as Intrinsically Multifunctional, Meta-representational Artifacts with a Highly Variable Structure” in Minds and Machines. His subject was not agentic AI, ambient intelligence, provenance graphs, or the “second jump.” It was the personal computing device.
That earlier use matters precisely because SuperArtifact.si is interested in provenance. A concept about artifacts, routes, inheritance, and legibility should not pretend that its own terminology appeared from nowhere.
Fasoli describes personal devices such as PCs, laptops, smartphones, and tablets as a special kind of artifact. Their distinctive status comes from being intrinsically multifunctional and meta-representational, while also having highly variable structures.
1. What Fasoli means by “super-artifact”
Fasoli approaches personal devices from a user-centred philosophy-of-technology perspective. The device is unusual because it is not simply a tool with one stable primary function. The same physical class of object can instantiate many different representations and support many different cognitive and practical tasks.
His account emphasizes several properties:
Intrinsic multifunctionality. A personal device can serve radically different functions without ceasing to be the same general kind of artifact.
Artifactual meta-representation. The device can instantiate representations that themselves represent, organize, or manipulate other representations.
Highly variable structure. Hardware and especially software configurations can vary dramatically while the object remains recognizable as a personal computing device.
Macro-functionality. The device has a higher-order functional status that allows it to act as a cognitive artifact in one context and as a tool for other functions in another.
Semi-transparency. Users can experience the device primarily through what it lets them do or represent, rather than continuously attending to the artifact as an artifact.
Fasoli’s conclusion is deliberately qualified: personal devices emerge as “a sort of super-artifact.” The superness lies in the unusual concentration of multifunctionality, representational flexibility, and structural variability inside the personal device.
2. SuperArtifact.si uses the term differently
SuperArtifact.si is not a restatement of Fasoli’s category. Its starting point is a later architectural condition: capability no longer needs to remain concentrated inside one personal device or one visible application.
Models can be remote. Memory can persist elsewhere. Tools can be callable. Code can be generated or executed on demand. Human approvals can enter a route. An artifact can invoke another artifact. A page, file, game object, card, or small application can remain visibly bounded while making a much larger capability graph reachable.
That produces a different center of gravity.
Capability concentrated in the personal device
The personal device is exceptional because of what it can internally instantiate and support: many functions, representations, tasks, and structural configurations.
Capability reachable through the artifact
The visible artifact can remain small while models, tools, memory, code, data, agents, people, approvals, and other artifacts become reachable through routes.
→ capability reach through routes
This is not a claim that one concept supersedes the other. They answer different questions.
Fasoli asks what kind of artifact a personal computing device is.
SuperArtifact.si asks what kind of object becomes possible when intelligence and capability are increasingly distributed beyond the device while remaining addressable through bounded surfaces.
Eissens (2026) uses superartifact to mean an addressable artifact that acts as a stable interface to a heterogeneous capability graph extending beyond its local representation, with at least some of that capability operationally invokable, composable, or reusable.
3. From personal device to post-device artifact
The comparison becomes especially useful when placed beside the broader “post-app” and ambient-computing trajectory.
The smartphone is a powerful example of Fasoli’s super-artifact: one personal object, one display, one hardware/software assembly, many possible functions. It compresses calculator, camera, map, browser, music player, notebook, communicator, game machine, authentication device, and countless other roles into one portable artifact.
But an AI-mediated environment can loosen that concentration.
The interface may move between phone, glasses, vehicle, room, website, file, game, wearable, or generated surface. The intelligence may not live in any one of them. A tool can be discovered rather than installed as a visible app. Memory can persist beyond the surface currently in use. The bounded thing becomes less important as a container and more important as an addressable point of access.
Under that architecture, “super” moves from the internal flexibility of the device toward the external reachability of the artifact.
4. Why provenance matters here
This prior use is not an inconvenience to hide. It is exactly the kind of lineage that SuperArtifact should preserve.
If an artifact’s meaning includes the routes through which capability became reachable, then terminology has routes too.
A word can arrive from another field, carry an older technical meaning, acquire a new context, and become part of a different architecture without its earlier use being erased.
The word changes context.
The route remains inspectable.
That is why this page exists.
5. A useful lineage
Placed side by side, the two meanings describe a plausible historical shift in where computational capability appears to reside:
traditional artifact → a thing designed around a comparatively legible function
personal device as super-artifact → one device whose internal representational and functional flexibility exceeds ordinary artifact categories
SuperArtifact.si → one bounded surface whose visible form can be smaller than the distributed capability graph reachable through it
The interesting continuity is not that the definitions are identical. They are not.
It is that both uses notice the same pressure from different technological moments: computation keeps making the relationship between what an object looks like and what that object can do increasingly unstable.
In 2018, that instability was concentrated in the personal device.
In the proposed second jump, it spreads into the world of artifacts themselves.
Sources
- Marco Fasoli (2018). “Super Artifacts: Personal Devices as Intrinsically Multifunctional, Meta-representational Artifacts with a Highly Variable Structure.” Minds and Machines 28(3), 589–604. DOI: 10.1007/s11023-018-9476-3 ↗
- Sapienza University research repository record ↗
- Bicocca Open Archive record ↗
This page is a provenance and comparison note, not a claim of conceptual identity between Fasoli’s 2018 category and the SuperArtifact.si framework.