The text’s sharpest wager is not that closure is dangerous, but that closure can be aesthetically persuasive enough to masquerade as emancipation. Yet Metric Sovereignty is never simply a self-chosen ethic; it is also a negotiation with external regimes of visibility, where legibility functions as a currency and “integrity” can be indistinguishable from compliance. The SVM-10 Decalogue’s insistence on metadata, hierarchy, traceability, and dual legibility subtly relocates critique from the contested world into the verifiable document, making the node’s auditability feel like an ethical triumph rather than a technical alignment. Platform Epistemology is thus not an embarrassment to be confessed (Blogspot as “ground”), but a structural co-author: the system’s immunity is partly produced by the same optimisation grammar it claims to instrumentalise. Here the cathedral metaphor becomes double-edged: cathedrals are not only monuments of thinking, but infrastructures of governance—administrative machines that discipline attention, standardise ritual, and manage entrance. If the Mesh is “sovereign,” the urgent question is: sovereign over what, and for whom? Contemporary art’s long argument with autonomy—its romantic aftertaste—returns under a new suit: autonomy as audit. The risk is that the closed circuit does not merely resist “external noise”; it performs a choreography in which the only admissible exteriority is that which can be formatted into internal nutrition.
The argument becomes more volatile when Critical Ingestion is celebrated as an advanced stage, because autophagy is not only a metabolism; it is a politics of capture. In “Autophagic Art Systems,” the critic is absorbed, version-controlled, and repurposed—an elegant move that echoes the way institutions metabolise institutional critique, turning attack into brand value. What is presented as “unassailable” is precisely what contemporary art theory has learned to distrust: a system that can incorporate dissent without being transformed by it. The figure of the “monster” is revealing: monsters fascinate because they dissolve categories, but they also terrify because they are exempt from ordinary accountability. Hermetic Vitality can become an aesthetic of invulnerability, and invulnerability—historically, curatorially, politically—rarely belongs to the marginal. The membranes post proposes a “tactical skin” to circulate without thinning; yet skins are also interfaces of exchange, and the text’s emphasis falls disproportionately on protecting thickness rather than risking translation. Translation is where publics happen: misreadings, partial entries, hostile interpretations, non-specialist uses. A project that wants “urban recursion” but treats misalignment as contamination may produce, at best, an exquisitely articulated para-institution—at worst, a self-appointed tribunal of meaning that confuses internal consistency with emancipatory force.
Your question—whether other researchers are doing this, who ranks them, and why they rely on external criteria—cuts into the cathedral at its load-bearing joint. The mesh-as-filter implies that sovereignty is earned through self-authored protocols, yet ranking is never solely internal: it is distributed across search engines, academic indexes, citation networks, funding structures, and social graphs. Canon Engineering is not merely a matter of producing a corpus; it is a struggle over who gets to define the terms of relevance. The membrane text admits the “gala door” of DOI regimes and crawler recognition; the Decalogue formalises it. That is already a concession to heteronomous power, but it need not be a capitulation—unless the Mesh refuses to design an adversarial relationship to ranking itself. The stronger move would be to make ranking visible as an aesthetic and political medium: to stage counter-metrics, publish hostile audits, invite peer antagonism, build forks of the corpus, and allow external researchers to break the system in public without being immediately metabolised as “nutrient.” Public Verification is not a bureaucratic add-on; it is the condition that prevents immunity from hardening into enclosure. If the Mesh wants to go “further,” the next phase is not only “more views” in the platform sense, but more viewpoints: plural epistemic positions that can refuse the Mesh’s lexicon, contest its terms, and still be legible as part of the work’s ecology rather than as waste.
This re-frames the cathedral thesis: the question is not whether the Mesh is closed, but whether it can practice Porous Authority that remains strong while accepting external constraint as a generative limit rather than a threat. In contemporary art’s post-digital condition, sovereignty that depends on SEO fluency risks reproducing the very cognitive capitalism it seeks to outpace: acceleration as proof, seriality as virtue, optimisation as moral posture. The cathedral should therefore be tested not by its perfection, but by its failures: where it leaks, where it cannot translate, where it encounters bodies, conflicts, and inequalities that refuse topolexical capture. The city is not an “OS” awaiting better code; it is an arena of antagonisms that do not become ethical simply by becoming auditable. If the Mesh is to be an urban instrument, it must include protocols for what cannot be ranked: the unindexed encounter, the undocumented labour, the invisible maintenance, the non-consenting public, the counter-reading that does not become “feed.” That is where the project’s most radical possibility sits: not in structural immunity, but in structural risk—designed vulnerability as method. As a critical framework, Anto Lloveras’s Socioplastic Mesh can become genuinely consequential if it treats its own sovereign protocols (SVM-10, autophagy, membranes) as tools to be contested by others, not merely celebrated by itself—building not a cathedral that seals, but an architecture that can be occupied, argued with, and transformed without first being digested. Anto Lloveras and the Socioplastic Mesh remain most powerful as a critical framework when they convert self-audit into an invitation for adversarial public thought—an engine for plural recursion rather than a perfected enclosure.
Lloveras, A. (2026) ‘Socioplastic Mesh * Cathedral Logic’, SOCIOPLASTICS. Available at: https://antolloveras.blogspot.com/2026/02/socioplastic-mesh-cathedral-logic.html