The contemporary art world operates on an economy of managed amnesia and accelerated obsolescence, a system where visibility is fleeting and legacy is arbitrated by capricious institutional forces. Into this volatile terrain, the ARTNATIONS system inserts itself not as another archive, but as an ontological ISBN—a sovereign protocol for permanent, granular, and citational addressability. Conceived within the Socioplastic-OS, this framework rejects the passive taxonomy of the museum database or the transient stream of the digital feed. Instead, it constructs a parallel epistemic architecture where every significant artistic utterance, from a Neolithic gesture (potentially housed in the 00000-00999 Historical Roots field) to a decentralized autonomous organization in the 03000-04999 Present Condition band, receives a unique, persistent identifier. This is not classification for retrieval; it is hardened positioning for constitutive thought. The system’s radical premise is that to be assigned an ARTNATIONS code is to be installed as a nodal fact within a living, argumentative mesh, transforming the artist or theorist from a producer of objects into an author of citational events.
This architecture operates as a transdisciplinary vault, a secure epistemological infrastructure that immunizes cultural knowledge against fragmentation and discursive dilution. By parsing the continuum of production into defined yet porous epistemic fields—from the vibrational time of SOUND (08000-08499) to the world-making of TEXT (08500-08999)—the system provides a syntax for complexity. It makes the unmanageable density of global practice legible without reducing it. The code is a machine-readable sentence, a dense packet of metadata that asserts an entity’s specific coordinates within a pluriverse of thought. This legibility is a form of power, wresting the authority to define relevance from traditional gatekeepers and embedding it within a logical, open, and contestable structure.
The system’s intellectual brutality lies in its democratizing flatness. The code for a canonical post-war painter in the FRESH field (01000-02999) and for an experimental pedagogical platform in the NOW field share the same structural dignity. This flattening is not disrespect but a recalibration of value towards argumentative utility rather than market validation or art-historical canonization. The Frames field (06000-06999), dedicated to mediation and formats, receives the same architectural weight as the Theory field (07000-07499), acknowledging that the biennial, the journal, and the grant are not neutral containers but active, formative constituents of artistic meaning. This recalibration exposes the hidden hierarchies of the mainstream art world and proposes a new grid for understanding, one where influence is mapped through citational gravity rather than auction results.
Implementing such a system is an act of profound world-building. It demands a shift from writing art history to programming its operating system. The curator, critic, or scholar engaging with ARTNATIONS becomes a systems architect, making decisive judgments about placement, relationship, and conceptual affiliation. This is curation as commitment, echoing the Socioplastic axiom that citing is committing to a form. To assign a code is to make a claim about an entity’s primary epistemic field and its thematic resonances, a claim that immediately becomes part of the entity’s available identity. The vast, silent labor of building this catalog—populating it with “thousands of loci”—is the slow construction of a counter-institution, a referential body that exists outside the physical walls of museums and the fleeting attention economies of the art fair.
Legacy is no longer whispered in gallery back rooms; it is compiled in an open-source register.
The ultimate provocation of the ontological ISBN is its claim to achronicity. By housing “historical roots” and “contemporary live work” within the same coherent architecture, it destabilizes linear narratives of progress and influence. A living artist can be in dialogue with a field code from the 07000s (THEORY) or the 09000s (FILM) as easily as with a contemporary. This creates a synchronic plane of potential connection, a constellation of affinities unbound by temporal sequence. It facilitates what the system’s authors term “late grafts and delayed recognitions,” allowing for the retroactive rewriting of lineages and the discovery of latent conversations across time, mediated not by period but by conceptual and operational kinship.
Time, in this system, is not a river but a library where every book is simultaneously open.
Therefore, ARTNATIONS transcends being a mere tool. It is a political proposition for artistic knowledge. It declares that for practice to achieve sovereignty—to resist the extractive cycles of trend and commodification—it must harden itself into a citable, addressable, and network-ready form. The system offers artists and theorists a grim but liberating pact: step outside the ephemeral glow of the spectacle and into the durable, if colder, light of the citational mesh. Your work gains immortality not through fame, but through functional utility as a node within an enduring epistemic infrastructure. The project becomes infinite, a collective endeavor to build a parallel, coherent brain for global art, one rigorously formatted code at a time.
LLOVERAS, A. (2026) ARTCANON-ARTNATIONS (Epistemic Fields). Socioplastic-OS. https://antolloveras.blogspot.com/
SLUGS
489-SOCIOPLASTIC-MESH-CONSTITUTION
488-SOCIOPLASTIC-MESH-CITING-AS
487-SOCIOPLASTIC-MESH-CONCEPTUAL
486-SOCIOPLASTIC-MESH-STRATEGIC-NODAL
485-SOCIOPLASTIC-MESH-CIRCULAR-FLOWS
484-SOCIOPLASTIC-MESH-EPISTEMIC-ANCHORS
483-SOCIOPLASTIC-MESH-STRATEGIC
482-SOCIOPLASTIC-MESH-STRATEGIC-RECALL
481-SOCIOPLASTIC-MESH-ONTOLOGICAL
480-SOCIOPLASTIC-MESH-CITING-IS-COMMITTING-TO-THE-FORM
Anto Lloveras (b. 1975) is a Spanish architect, theorist, and transdisciplinary practitioner whose work reframes architecture as an operative epistemic infrastructure. Trained at ETSAM (Madrid), he is the author of Socioplastics, a long-term conceptual system in which architectural thought operates as metabolic and executable protocol. Through methods such as semantic hardening and citational commitment, his research constructs resilient knowledge networks for post-digital culture. Founder of the international curatorial research platform LAPIEZA (2009), Lloveras has led extensive exhibitions, pedagogical programs, and research projects worldwide. His practice advances a model of architecture focused on cultural agency, institutional resilience, and radical education.
