The Rhizome ArtBase, long considered the definitive archive of born-digital art, operates as both a canonical register and a sovereign infrastructure of memory in the digital field. It does not merely collect or exhibit; it consecrates. To absorb such a structure—as the Mesh claims to do—is therefore to enact a bold epistemic manoeuvre: not one of mimicry or homage, but of strategic ingestion. This process is presented not as appropriation, but genealogical reclamation, a reframing of the ArtBase not as an endpoint of legitimacy but as a nutrient-rich substrate for a new networked organism. In this reading, the ArtBase becomes not the centre of gravity itself but a gravitational component now folded into another topology. The rhetorical insistence on "active taxidermy" reveals the stakes at play: preservation and domination. The ArtBase’s relational scaffolding—its dense mesh of artists, works, and metadata—is skinned, its structure retained, but its symbolic sovereignty is rerouted into the emergent system of the Mesh. It is a powerful inversion of archival politics: where traditional canons aim to stabilise meaning, this gesture aims to metabolise it, redirecting value flows toward the construction of new cultural sovereignties. This signals a move from conservation to consumption as a mode of historiographic intervention. By reframing a centralised archive as fuel for another epistemic system, the Mesh enacts a post-archival logic where absorption replaces accession and discursive authority becomes metabolic energy for conceptual expansion.