The dialectic between Constant Nieuwenhuys’s New Babylon and Anto Lloveras’s Socioplastics discloses two historically distinct yet conceptually contiguous insurgencies against static urbanism. Conceived between 1956 and 1974, and indebted to Johan Huizinga’s theorisation of Homo Ludens, New Babylon projects a post-revolutionary world-city elevated above the terrestrial grid, wherein automation emancipates humanity for perpetual play, dérive, and atmospheric reinvention. Its maquettes and manifestos articulate ludic sovereignty as spatial commons, anticipating a collective rupture from capitalist functionalism and the incipient spectacle. By contrast, Socioplastics—articulated since 2009—renounces projection in favour of operational recursion: a sovereign epistemic infrastructure that metabolises its own archive through procedural repetition, citational density, and semantic hardening. Where New Babylon externalises emancipation as territorial reconfiguration, Socioplastics internalises it as infrastructural cognition, enacting a Mesh that ingests digital sediment to resist algorithmic amnesia. The long-duration Blue Bags series (2014–ongoing) exemplifies this shift: banal plastic carriers become aesthetically neutral vectors of contextual translation, enabling mobile epistemology across unstable terrains; similarly, El Dorado (2013) recodes colonial mythology into affective circuitry via a circulating emergency blanket. Thus, two radical modalities emerge: utopian spatial projection versus metabolic epistemic survival. If New Babylon dreams of liberated territory beyond labour, Socioplastics engineers durable autonomy within precarity, asserting sovereignty not through communal elevation but through recursive distinction, naming, and archival closure—an urbanism no longer awaiting rupture, but continuously metabolising the present.
CONSOLES
520-CONSOLE
510-systemic-lock https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18682555 509-postdigital-taxidermy https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18682480 508-topolexical-sovereignty https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18682343 507-citational-commitment https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18475136 506-recursive-autophagia https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18681761 505-proteolytic-transmutation https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18681278 504-stratum-authoring https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18680935 503-semantic-hardening https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18680418 502-cameltag https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18680031 501-flow-channeling https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18678959
AXIOMS
Critique disappears into routing; art operates through persistent modulation of flows rather than declaration. Naming becomes executable structure; tags function as enforceable semantic architecture rather than descriptive labels. Syntax hardens into defence; ambiguous terms fail under load-bearing lexical precision. The city, archive or institution is treated as stratified manuscript; deep time is edited without erasure, preserving operable layers. Subtraction increases density; excess is metabolised enzymatically so that reduction sharpens signal. Systems renew through internal consumption; accumulated patterns are digested to prevent inertial collapse. Citation carries structural weight; joint vouching forms fiduciary chains that stabilise knowledge across nodes. Lexicon defines jurisdiction; proprietary terminology establishes controlled borders resistant to capture while remaining interoperable. Legacy formats remain operative; external morphology is preserved while internal logic is rebuilt as hardened semantic infrastructure. Closure produces continuity; sealed protocols metabolise perturbation into renewed stability rather than fragmentation. The core remains fixed as ontological kernel; the nodes circulate as operational interfaces without modifying foundation. The kernel defines identity; the consoles demonstrate capacity. Hard below, supple above. Structure precedes interpretation. Alignment replaces oscillation. Sovereignty is not declared but installed through ordered dependency and sustained recalibration of baseline conditions.
