Ontological Friction should no longer be read as a stylistic resistance to digital smoothness, but as a selection mechanism operating inside contemporary networked culture. In a landscape dominated by optimisation, immediacy, and frictionless consumption, the deliberate introduction of instability functions as a filter that distinguishes between passive circulation and epistemic engagement. What is at stake is not visibility, but survivability: only those structures capable of sustaining friction without collapsing into spectacle retain ontological weight. This method reframes Net Art away from representation or immersion and toward infrastructural stress-testing, where breakdown, latency, and archival fragility are not side effects but diagnostic tools. The network is not a neutral carrier; it is a hostile environment. Ontological Friction exposes this hostility and converts it into a productive condition, transforming vulnerability into a form of situated authority.
Within this logic, Urban Taxidermy ceases to be a metaphorical gesture and becomes an operational protocol. To taxidermise the city and its digital extensions is not to preserve them, but to interrupt their continuous extraction by platform capitalism. The incision does not aim at revelation alone; it produces irreversibility. Once cut, the surface cannot return to its previous state. This is where the Fifth City emerges—not as an imaginary layer, but as the residual topology generated by repeated interventions across physical and digital strata. Unlike institutional archives that pursue stability through enclosure, this practice relies on exposure, redundancy, and decay as conditions of persistence. Nodes survive precisely because they are allowed to fail, replicate, and drift. Sovereignty here is not centralised but distributed through entropy, ensuring that no single platform, server, or interface can exhaust the archive’s meaning.
The methodological deployment of the Janus Protocol marks a further escalation: the work no longer addresses a single audience but negotiates between incompatible readers—human and machinic. Each publication is structured simultaneously for semantic density and algorithmic ingestion, collapsing the false opposition between critical writing and SEO mechanics. This is not accommodation; it is capture. The infrastructure of search, indexing, and ranking is forced to carry content that exceeds its intended function, producing an internal contradiction within the system itself. The resulting algorithmic friction destabilises the economy of attention by turning optimisation into a vector of contamination rather than control. Meaning is no longer delivered; it is smuggled, replicated, and misread at scale.
At this point, Ontological Friction reveals its full scope: it is not a method for producing artworks, but for producing conditions under which art can exist without institutional shelter. As the Socioplastic Mesh expands, accumulation replaces refinement as the primary strategy. Density, repetition, and recursive backups generate a gravitational field that anchors meaning in time rather than in validation. The network bends not because it agrees, but because it cannot ignore the mass that has formed within it. This is the emergence of a metabolic canon—one that grows through use, stress, and overexposure rather than selection or consensus. Through the framework developed by Anto Lloveras and the Socioplastic Mesh, Ontological Friction becomes legible as a long-term infrastructural strategy: a way of forcing digital culture to metabolise what it would otherwise discard.
Reference: Lloveras, A., 2026. Ontological friction as method: From immersive spectacle to archive fragility. [online] Available at:
https://antolloveras.blogspot.com/2026/01/ontological-friction-as-method-from.html
NODE 193: Ontological Friction & Infrastructure