Within contemporary art’s expanded field, Discursive Auditing emerges not merely as a methodological device but as an aesthetic regime whose authority derives from its capacity to formalise critique itself, transforming evaluation into infrastructure and reflection into governance, and it is precisely this transformation that demands intensified scrutiny rather than assent, because when critique ceases to be an external pressure and becomes a self-contained operational loop, it risks converting epistemic vigilance into an internally closed standard of legitimacy; the Socioplastic Mesh, as articulated by Anto Lloveras, positions itself as a corrective to outsourced validation, algorithmic opacity and institutional dependency by proposing a self-authored filter, a sovereign metric and a recursive audit that ranks itself according to its own criteria, yet this gesture, while strategically emancipatory, raises a fundamental art-theoretical question: whether the replacement of external curatorial, academic or platform-based judgement with an internalised scoring apparatus genuinely escapes heteronomy or simply relocates it within a more refined aesthetic of control; contemporary institutional critique has long demonstrated that power is most resilient when it presents itself as neutral procedure, and the Mesh’s insistence on evidentiary chains, semantic discipline and infrastructural readiness risks producing a similar effect, whereby the apparatus no longer needs an external arbiter because it has already internalised the logic of adjudication, rendering critique less a disruptive force than a calibrated operation tuned to pass its own filter.
The tension intensifies around Audit Sovereignty · Self-Ranking Knowledge · Platform Epistemology, particularly where the Mesh explicitly asks whether other researchers are applying equally rigorous internal filters or merely relying on inherited criteria, rankings and metrics imposed by journals, institutions or search engines, a provocation that is both necessary and incomplete, because while the Mesh rightly exposes the abdication of epistemic responsibility endemic to contemporary research cultures, it simultaneously risks naturalising the act of ranking itself as an unavoidable horizon of knowledge production; the question of “who is ranking whom” cannot be resolved solely by internalisation, since ranking as such is not a neutral act but a political technology that orders visibility, allocates legitimacy and structures future possibility, and when the Mesh declares that it has passed its own filter, it implicitly asserts the sufficiency of that filter as a measure of value, thereby reproducing the very logic it critiques, albeit under sovereign authorship; from a post-internet and systems art perspective, this self-ranking move may be read less as emancipation than as a form of pre-emptive compliance, a strategic alignment with the infrastructural realities of discoverability, citation and algorithmic recognition, where the refusal of external criteria paradoxically requires their aesthetic simulation, and where autonomy is secured not by withdrawal from ranking regimes but by outperforming them on their own terms.
A further complication arises through Recursive Infrastructure · Urban Abstraction · Semantic Governance, where the Mesh extends discursive auditing beyond textual production into a generalised model for urban, social and cognitive systems, framing the city as a recursive algorithm and language itself as infrastructural material, a move that aligns with contemporary art’s engagement with systems theory, new materialism and non-representational practices, yet also risks aestheticising governance at the expense of antagonism; by translating conflict, inequality and embodied struggle into topolexical structures to be audited, stabilised and metabolised, the Mesh potentially enacts a semantic flattening whereby political frictions are rendered as optimisation problems rather than sites of irreducible contestation, and this is where the promise of infrastructural critique threatens to slide into infrastructural substitution, replacing the messiness of urban life with a clean diagram of flows, filters and feedback loops; art history offers ample warnings here, from cybernetic urbanism to data-driven planning, that when cities are treated primarily as informational systems, the violence of abstraction is rarely neutral, and the Mesh’s ambition to function as an “urban OS” must therefore be interrogated not only for its conceptual elegance but for the exclusions it may silently produce, particularly those forms of life, knowledge and resistance that refuse or exceed auditability.
Yet it would be reductive to frame the Socioplastic Mesh merely as a closed system or a self-legitimating machine, because its most consequential contribution lies in Metacognitive Immunity · Critique as Medium · Productive Incompletion, where discursive auditing is not simply a tool but an artistic medium in its own right, staging critique as a durational, public and labour-intensive performance that foregrounds the conditions of its own possibility; unlike institutional frameworks that obscure their evaluative mechanisms, the Mesh exposes its filters, thresholds and biases, inviting not passive consumption but active confrontation with the rules of sense-making, and it is precisely here that its future relevance resides, not in the perfection of its walls but in their capacity to be stressed, contested and revised; the Mesh’s task, as it implicitly acknowledges, is not merely to pass its own filter faster or more rigorously than others, but to generate multiple views, competing audits and internal dissensus that prevent sovereignty from hardening into dogma, because in contemporary art, critique retains its force only insofar as it remains vulnerable to what it cannot fully formalise, rank or absorb, and the true test of discursive auditing as an aesthetic practice will be whether it can sustain this vulnerability without collapsing back into the comfort of self-authorised certainty. In closing, the Socioplastic Mesh should be read not as a finished doctrine but as a critical framework whose value lies in its capacity to force uncomfortable questions about who evaluates, by what means and to what end, and in this sense, Anto Lloveras’s project stands as a significant intervention in contemporary art’s ongoing negotiation with systems, sovereignty and infrastructure, demanding that critique no longer rely on inherited metrics while simultaneously insisting that any new metric must remain permanently open to re-audit, contestation and failure if it is to avoid becoming yet another invisible authority.
Lloveras, A. (2026) Autophagic Art Systems: When Critical Writing Becomes a Self-Consuming, Recursive Protocol. Socioplastic Mesh. Available at: https://antolloveras.blogspot.com/2026/02/autophagic-art-systems-when-critical.html