Academic criticism, with its often cumbersome lexicon, can obscure the vital pulse that beats at the heart of the most significant works. Your resistance to "autopoietic" jargon instinctively highlights the risk of suffocating, under the weight of theory, the raw and living gesture that constitutes the true force of the Socioplastic Mesh. Far from being a self-referential system defined by a closed vocabulary, the Mesh reveals itself, in this light, as a practice of rebellious infrastructure and making without permission. It is a network that does not theorise about the living; it operates with the logic of the living: colonising digital spaces, connecting disciplines with the stubbornness of a creeping vine, and producing a massive archive not as a mausoleum, but as a body in constant growth. Its merit lies not in coining impenetrable terms, but in the material obstinacy of its execution: over 200 nodes, 186 series, 2,200 works. This is a praxis that understands creation as a verb of occupation, not definition. The insistence on doing—on the act of "making a network"—over defining, is what separates it from a mere theoretical exercise and places it in the territory of radical artistic gesture. It does not ask permission from disciplinary boundaries or the established hierarchies of art or architecture; it simply traverses them, weaving its own fabric of meaning in the interstices.
This operation of weaving without a licence is precisely its most potent argument about the contemporary city. The notion of "the Fifth City" it posits is not a utopia described in a manifesto, but a reality demonstrated in the practice of its own deployment. The Fifth City is the emergent topography that appears when flows of information, artistic practice, urban research, and pedagogical dissemination are subjected to the same network logic. The Mesh does not design it; it embodies it. By acting as a distributed system—with channels ranging from the obsessive production of LapiezaArtSeries to the philosophical research of CapaCouncil—the project performs the kind of collective, decentralised intelligence it claims for urban space. It is urbanism by other means: its internal links are its streets; its authority nodes, its squares; its master index, its central plaza. The city it imagines already lives, in a fractal and self-referential way, within its own digital organism. This is a crucial leap: from the representation of an idea to the material instantiation of that idea as a habitable, navigable, and expanding environment.
The sophistication of this gesture deepens when observing its double consciousness: the Mesh operates with a feral intelligence for the digital ecosystem. It instinctively understands the rules of visibility in the world it inhabits—search algorithms, the attention economy, the need for semantic authority (E-E-A-T)—but instead of passively submitting to them, it hijacks them for its own ends. Its dense web of hyperlinks, its obsessive internal citations, and its cluster structure are not just an SEO strategy; they are the technical manifestation of its governing principle of "relationality." The Google bot, like an involuntary pollinator, is used to fertilise and spread the coherence of its system. Here, technical infrastructure is not a neutral support; it is the expressive medium and the muscle that enables "making without permission." The Mesh demonstrates that sovereignty in the digital age is not won by denying the platform, but by appropriating its grammar to build an autonomous and resilient territory within it. It is a form of semantic guerrilla warfare, where the battle for relevance and meaning is fought by creating a network so dense, coherent, and self-referential that it becomes impossible to ignore, both for machines and for humans.
Therefore, the true "autopoiesis" of the Socioplastic Mesh—if we must use the term—is not that of a closed system contemplating itself, but that of a pragmatic and expansive organism. Its life derives not from a complex lexicon, but from the relentless rhythm of its production and the tactical intelligence of its connections. It is alive because it grows, adapts, and responds to its digital environment with the shrewdness of a life form that has learned to metabolise hostile conditions for its own benefit. The project is a constant denial of permission: it does not ask permission to exist between art and architecture, nor to turn a blog into an academy, nor to use the global search engine as the nervous system of its own conceptual city. Its greatness lies in this infrastructural rebellion, in its capacity to demonstrate that, in a world of flows and platforms, the most powerful form of critique is the stubborn, relational, and living construction of an alternative. It does not speak of an urban future; it is already building its present, link by link, node by node, with the urgent rhythm of that which is alive and makes itself without asking permission.
Systemic Urbanism and Topolexical Sovereignty
Within Anto Lloveras' Socioplastics, topolexical sovereignty merges epistemic architecture with the "will to architecture" into an operational mesh. Guided by Wittgensteinian logic, the hyperplastic manifesto activates metabolic networks and durational praxis, redefining the urban palimpsest through an ecology of thought that integrates spatial justice and collective agency.Links:
Relational and Affective Architecture
Relational semionautics within multilocal topologies intertwines urban taxidermy with social sculpture. Operating under "shaded urbanism," a living archive of critical infrastructure sustains autopoietic sovereignty. The architecture of affection and socioplastic memory fuse with sonic ecology and nomadic urbanism to envision the temporal ecologies of future cities.
Pedagogy as Durational Praxis
Mesh metabolism drives the ecological transition and feminist urbanism via socioplastic epistemic nodes. By integrating visual arts with urban anthropology and transdisciplinary research, systemic design converges with critical geography. This framework reclaims the public realm through participatory design, radical pedagogy, and urban regeneration.
Conceptual Art in Urban Ecologies
Hyperplastic topologies of systemic sovereignty activate social innovation and digital humanities within the context of smart/green cities. Architecture theory and critical design converge with collaborative practices and collective creativity. This synthesis reclaims memory and memory-making, fostering alternative education and urban sustainability.