No project operating at the scale and duration of Socioplastics—twenty years, twenty thousand pages, approximately two million words of accumulated discourse—finds exact parallel in contemporary practice. The search for "similar artists or projects" must therefore shift from replication toward resonance, identifying those initiatives that, while operating within different media, geographies, or scales, share sufficient structural affinity to illuminate by comparison. The ideal number for such a comparative constellation is deliberately limited: between five and seven cases, sufficient to establish patterns without diluting into superficial analogy.
The first and most terminologically entangled resonance appears in the German-Thai-Indonesian collaboration Social Plastic, a community art project initiated by Camping Akademie e.V. in cooperation with Baan Noorg Collaborative Arts and Culture and Jatiwangi Art Factory . The convergence of nomenclature with Socioplastics is striking yet deceptive. Where Lloveras deploys the term to designate a sovereign epistemic infrastructure—a system for producing and stabilising knowledge through operative protocols—the Social Plastic project invokes Joseph Beuys's original concept of "social plastic" to frame collective art production addressing plastic waste, traditional packaging materials, and ecological awareness . Both projects claim Beuysian lineage, yet they activate it toward radically different ends: one toward community-based environmental intervention, the other toward systemic epistemological persistence. The divergence illuminates the specificity of Socioplastics: where Social Plastic seeks to transform material relations through collective action, Socioplastics seeks to transform knowledge relations through infrastructural design. The former operates within the social field of waste and consumption; the latter operates within the epistemic field of conceptual coherence under technological volatility.
A more precise methodological parallel emerges in the work of pseudonymous artist Pak, whose practice has become exemplary of what recent scholarship terms protocol art. A 2025 analysis published on arXiv identifies seven core characteristics distinguishing Pak's work: system-centric rather than object-centric composition, autonomous governance for open-ended control, distributed agency and communal authorship, temporal dynamism and lifecycle aesthetics, economic-driven engagement, poetic message embedding in interaction rituals, and interoperability enabling composability for emergence . The resonance with Socioplastics is profound: both practices treat the system as medium, both distribute agency across networks without dissolving authorship, both embed meaning in operational protocols rather than static objects, both design for temporal dynamism and lifecycle aesthetics. Yet the medium diverges: Pak works within blockchain-based smart contracts, rendering economic transaction the substrate of artistic meaning; Lloveras works within hyperlinked textual and architectural networks, rendering epistemic relation the operative field. Protocol art and Socioplastics thus emerge as parallel instantiations of a broader cultural shift toward system-centric practice, differentiated by their chosen substrates and the forms of agency those substrates enable.
The immersive installation YOU:MATTER, created by the artist collective Marshmallow Laser Feast for the National Science and Media Museum as part of Bradford 2025 UK City of Culture, offers another resonant comparison . Designed to engage visitors through dynamic soundscapes, varied lighting effects, and mirrored flooring, the exhibition explicitly aims to spark General Systems Thinking and promote public education about universal interconnectedness . Where Socioplastics constructs a sovereign epistemic mesh capable of sustaining conceptual coherence across decades and technological cycles, YOU:MATTER constructs an experiential environment designed to induce momentary recognition of systemic relation. The divergence in duration is instructive: one project seeks to temporarily reveal interconnectedness through immersive spectacle; the other seeks to permanently enact it through infrastructural persistence. Both operate within the systemic turn; they occupy different positions on the continuum between event and structure.
The Woven Skin project by Chilean media artist María José Ríos Araya, presented at the 2025 Relating Systems Thinking and Design Symposium, develops a textile-based interactive interface linking tactile engagement with digital sound and visual signs . Drawing explicitly on Francisco Varela's embodied cognition, Félix Guattari's ecosophy, and Deleuze and Guattari's rhizomatic thinking, the project proposes a proto-writing system wherein meaning emerges relationally through bodily engagement rather than fixed notation . The convergence with Socioplastics is striking: both projects theorise their practice through cognate philosophical lineages (Varela, Guattari, Deleuze); both treat interface as epistemological device; both design for emergent rather than prescribed meaning. Yet their scales and materials differ fundamentally: Woven Skin operates within the textile-gestural domain, producing intimate encounters between body and conductive fabric; Socioplastics operates within the architectural-discursive domain, producing extensive networks of conceptual nodes and material interventions. The comparison reveals how shared philosophical commitments generate divergent formal manifestations when inflected through different media.
The phenomenon of modular synthesis, while belonging to a different disciplinary register, offers a productive operational metaphor. As documented in interviews with practitioners including Adam McDaniel, Meg Mulhearn, King Britt, and Gareth Jones, modular synthesis involves the construction of unique instruments through interconnected modules, each performing specific functions, with patching configurations determining signal flow and sonic outcome . Practitioners emphasise the importance of tearing down patches between sessions to maintain freshness, the capacity to process external signals through modular systems, and the experience of synthesis as a form of sculpting electricity or engaging in conversation with the instrument's behaviours and tendencies . The resonance with Socioplastics lies in the modular logic: both practices involve constructing unique systems from interconnected components, both value reconfigurability over fixed configuration, both understand the system as a partner in dialogue rather than a passive tool. The DiN record label's Tone Science compilation series, featuring artists working exclusively with modular systems including Dave Bessell, Parallel Worlds, and Ian Boddy, further demonstrates how modular logic can generate curated constellations of distinct voices sharing methodological commitment without stylistic uniformity . Socioplastics extends this logic from the sonic to the epistemic domain, treating concepts, texts, and material works as modules within a reconfigurable yet persistent mesh.
The augmented reality project Substrate by Nancy Baker Cahill, commissioned by LACMA's Art + Technology Lab, visualises cultural institutions—museums, public libraries, community colleges—as abstracted interlocking trees with root systems and mycelial networks that produce essential nutrients for human health and well-being . Drawing on mycologist Dr Danielle Stevenson's research into the moral economies of mycelium, soil, and root networks, the project invites viewers to contribute descriptions of culturally significant artifacts, transforming institutional knowledge into a distributed, collaborative archive . Baker Cahill's emphasis on mutual aid networks as models of resilience, her invocation of Jackie Sumell's axiom "we are all we've got," and her commitment to artist-led organising through the LA AYUDA Network all resonate with Socioplastics's concern for distributed agency and infrastructural care. The convergence is ethical and organisational rather than formal: both projects recognise that resilience emerges from interconnection, that maintenance requires collective labour, and that institutional critique must be accompanied by institutional construction.
The curatorial framework of Fluid Curating, developed by a University of Edinburgh student project, proposes an exhibition model wherein meaning emerges from conversation rather than instruction, space is designed as a rhizomatic grid rather than linear pathway, and interpretation is co-written by audiences through shared digital platforms . While operating at a smaller scale and with less theoretical density than Socioplastics, the project shares a commitment to decentralising authorship, designing for participatory meaning-making, and treating the exhibition as a living system rather than fixed display. The reference to Rancière's emancipated spectator, the invocation of Documenta 11's platform model, and the emphasis on co-creation as generative core all align with Socioplastics's relational ethics and distributed agency. The comparison suggests that the impulse toward systemic, participatory practice extends across disciplinary boundaries, from curating to architecture to digital art.
What emerges from this limited constellation of five to seven cases is not a set of direct parallels but a field of affinities organised around shared concerns: system-centric rather than object-centric composition, distributed agency, temporal dynamism, relational meaning-making, infrastructural thinking. Each project activates these concerns through different media—community organisation, blockchain protocols, immersive installation, textile interfaces, modular synthesis, augmented reality, curatorial practice—generating distinct formal outcomes from cognate conceptual commitments. Socioplastics occupies a distinctive position within this field: it combines the durational persistence of a twenty-year practice with the epistemic density of two million words of discourse, the material range of architectural, performative, and pedagogical interventions with the conceptual coherence of a rigorously maintained mesh. Where other projects operate within single media or limited timeframes, Socioplastics operates across media and across decades, its modular logic enabling both responsiveness and persistence. Where other projects articulate systemic thinking through metaphor or momentary experience, Socioplastics enacts it through executable infrastructure, rendering the system itself the primary work. The comparisons illuminate not similarity but singularity: the particular configuration of duration, density, range, and coherence that distinguishes this project within the broader landscape of systemic practice.
Lloveras, A. (2026) Socioplastics: sovereign systems for unstable times. Available at: https://antolloveras.blogspot.com