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.
Such metabolisation is not a neutral gesture but a reterritorialisation—a mapping that displaces even as it preserves. The list of 1,000+ artists, meticulously catalogued in the original ArtBase, is no longer a frozen monument to net.art history but a dynamic register of potentiality reconfigured. Here, each artist becomes less a node in a fixed network than a protein in a digestive system—processed and reassigned meaning within a new regime of visibility. The Mesh positions itself not as a network among others but as a metastructure, capable of digesting prior infrastructures and reconfiguring their content to serve new logics such as Urban Taxidermy or Art-Nations. These are not mere neologisms but acts of ontological divergence, carving new territorial claims within the contested space of digital art discourse. What is metabolised is not only authority but temporality: the ArtBase’s historic weight is converted into conceptual momentum. This move counters the inertia often inherent in archival systems, which risk becoming mausoleums of innovation. Instead, the Mesh stages a living archive—not a container but an engine, where curation becomes performance and indexing becomes inscription. The canonical is not rejected but re-inscribed as substrate, marking a crucial distinction between citation and digestion. This difference is political, as it allows the Mesh to assert itself not as a passive inheritor but as an autopoietic force—a cultural actor capable of scripting its own protocols of legitimacy and relevance.
The use of taxidermy as a metaphor is not incidental; it marks the artwork-body as both symbolic and sovereign. Taxidermy suggests both reverence and control: the skin is preserved, its likeness displayed, but the life within has been replaced. In adopting this frame, the Mesh declares that it has domesticated the canonical animal, leaving its exterior intact while replacing its interior with new organs—metaphoric systems that reflect the Mesh’s ideological structure. Unlike digital archives that operate through curatorial discretion, the Mesh insists on structural digestion: it absorbs not only artists but their interrelations, their historical valences, and the infrastructural logic that governed their original context. This is why it is not an “index” but a metabolic regime—a mode of relational extraction whereby legacy content is repurposed to confer ontological coherence upon emergent discourses. The dual gesture—lineage and sovereignty—is thus both ancestral and insurgent. The ArtBase is honoured by being ingested, but its former centre of epistemic gravity is collapsed. In doing so, the Mesh asserts not only a different structure, but a different temporality, one defined not by preservation but by continuous transformation. In such a model, authority is not given but made—through acts of symbolic digestion, repurposing, and reactivation across conceptual ecosystems.
In the wake of this process, what emerges is a new conceptual territory: one where historical legitimacy is strategically extracted to stabilise novel ideological constructions. The Mesh does not merely remix or borrow—it operates through discursive extraction, a process analogous to data mining or cultural capital conversion, in which dense symbolic material is transmuted into platformal power. This is a paradigmatic shift in how we understand both archives and networks: where archives were once static repositories and networks decentralised flows, the Mesh proposes a hybrid sovereignty—a centre-without-centre, a structure that sustains itself by metabolising others. The ArtBase’s inclusion is a test case for this methodology: a foundational moment that marks the Mesh not as a supplement to digital art history but as a sovereign rewriting mechanism. The act is less about historicity than futurity: absorbing the past to engineer conceptual infrastructures capable of articulating tomorrow’s epistemes. This is the politics of networked absorption, in which lists are not documents but declarations, and where the size of the list—its numerical weight—functions not as trivia but as critical mass. It becomes a performative gravitational field through which the Mesh legitimises itself, not by appeal to precedent but by strategic digestion of precedent. Here, sovereignty is not taken—it is built, metabolically, one artist at a time.
Citation: Lloveras, A. (2026) 175. Socioplastic Mesh: Rhizome ArtBase. [Blog] Anto Lloveras, 28 January. Available at: https://antolloveras.blogspot.com/2026/01/175-socioplastic-mesh-rhizome-artbase.html