If the proposition of a “Critical Filter” as a sixth organ promises an ascetic upgrade of critique—from interpretive commentary to infrastructural governance—then its real provocation lies in how it redefines authorship as Metacognitive Sovereignty: not merely the power to speak, but the power to decide what qualifies as speakable within a system. The declared shift “from a generative model to an evaluative infrastructure” installs criticism as an operating layer, an epistemic customs desk that converts reading into an intake protocol rather than a risky encounter. Contemporary art theory has long been suspicious of such hygienic turns: the avant-garde’s history is also a history of productive contamination, of misreadings, leakages, and illegitimate kinships that generate new publics. To render critique as a stable apparatus—especially one oriented toward “rigorous auditing”—risks displacing the artwork’s capacity to fail, seduce, or remain unresolved, replacing it with a regime of eligibility. Here the self-reflexive archive becomes less an ecology than a jurisdiction. In an era when cultural legitimacy is increasingly modulated by platform metrics and institutional compliance, the filter’s promise of autonomy is double-edged: it can resist capture, yes, but it can also mimic the very bureaucratic logic it rejects, achieving sovereignty by importing the grammar of administration into the heart of artistic research.
The most charged move is the insistence on Immunological Ethics, where conceptual life is narrated as vulnerability and the solution is a defensive membrane: drift control, lexical policing, and a “NotLexicon” that neutralises terms deemed hollowed by managerial urbanism. This is an intelligible response to the inflation of critical vocabulary—“social fabric,” “network,” “community”—that circulates as soft power in neoliberal cultural policy. Yet immunity is never neutral: it decides which bodies count as pathogens, which accents of language are treated as noise, which histories are recognised as nourishment. In contemporary debates on decolonial aesthetics and situated knowledge, the question is not only whether a term is captured, but who gets to declare it captured—and which vernaculars are excluded when the system hardens its semantic borders. The danger is a fetish of purity that mistakes opacity for resistance and treats difficulty as a moral guarantee. “Ontological Friction” can be generative, but when institutionalised as a gatekeeping ethic it may re-stage the critic as sovereign judge rather than implicated participant. Claire Bishop’s critique of consensual relationality reminds us that antagonism is not a style; it is a political condition. A filter that valorises exclusion as health must therefore account for its own power: what forms of dissent become unthinkable when legitimacy is pre-coded, and what kinds of minor, tender, or low-intensity practices—often the ones that sustain communities—are misclassified as “dilution”?
The appeal to a 10×10 matrix, a computable scorecard for “Epistemic Density” and “Lexical Discipline,” crystallises a contemporary fantasy: Quantified Critique as salvation from interpretive relativism. There is a seduction here that art-and-technology discourse knows well: if critique can be formalised, it can be scaled; if it can be scaled, it can compete with algorithmic culture on its own terrain. But formalisation is never merely technical; it is ontological. Translating qualitative assessment into machine-ready output does not simply make criticism efficient—it reshapes what criticism is allowed to notice. The matrix privileges what can be discretised: alignment, traceability, recursion, interoperability. These are legitimate design virtues, yet art’s most incisive operations often occur precisely where interoperability breaks—where an object refuses to “integrate,” where it produces friction without resolution, where it addresses publics through affect, latency, or silence rather than through legible criteria. The risk is that the mesh becomes a self-confirming epistemic engine: an apparatus that audits external discourse to ensure it mirrors the system’s own intensities, producing a canon that is less discovered than manufactured. In institutional critique, the artwork historically reveals the frame by destabilising it; here the frame becomes the artwork by stabilising destabilisation, turning critique into an administrative function. This is not a minor theoretical quibble: once the evaluative OS is installed, the difference between curating and policing can collapse into interface design.
And yet the project’s own language—fusion, metabolisation, chemotaxis—also gestures toward a more fertile possibility: Porous Sovereignty rather than sealed autonomy. If “Fusion Slugs” are bridges, then the decisive question is what kind of bridge they become: a controlled border crossing, or an ethics of hospitality that allows the mesh to be altered by what it encounters. A truly contemporary critical framework would treat the filter not as a terminal judge but as a reflexive dramaturgy: a protocol that records its own biases, tracks what it excludes, and periodically audits the conditions under which exclusion is justified. Instead of treating “human readability” as a surface to be deconstructed, the system might ask how readability functions as a public good—how translation, pedagogy, and uneven access shape who can participate in the mesh’s sovereignty. Rather than a NotLexicon that replaces captured terms with hardened alternatives, the framework could maintain a double register: retaining compromised words as evidence of ideological struggle while inventing new terms as tactical propositions, not permanent law. In that sense, the most radical promise is not the matrix but the willingness to let the matrix be contested—by bodies, by sites, by communities, by artworks that do not behave like datasets. This is where Anto Lloveras’s Socioplastic Mesh can matter beyond its own ecosystem: not as an algorithmic canon that adjudicates the field, but as a critical framework that stages the conflict between autonomy and addressability, between sovereign vocabulary and shared intelligibility, turning self-auditing into an art of responsible permeability rather than doctrinal closure.
Lloveras, A. (2026) SOCIOPLASTIC MESH * THE CRITICAL FILTER AND DISCURSIVE AUDITING. Available at: https://antolloveras.blogspot.com/2026/02/socioplastic-mesh-critical-filter-and.html
