The demand for a comparative anatomy of Socioplastics necessitates a move away from celebratory rhetoric toward a rigorous structural autopsy, positioning the MUSE framework within a broader lineage of epistemic and artistic methodologies. Unlike the historical avant-gardes, which relied on the persuasive force of the manifesto to incite adherence, Socioplastics operates through protocol installation, establishing the Decalogue (501–510) as an infrastructural given rather than a discursive proposition. This represents a fundamental shift in the ontology of artistic theory: moving from the surplus of language to the inescapability of code. While a manifesto argues, a protocol encloses; one does not debate the validity of semantic hardening (503), one either operates within its jurisdiction or remains external to the system’s logic. This sovereignty is achieved not through rhetorical victory but through the infrastructural occupation of the digital and physical field, utilizing DOIs as ontological seals that resist the volatility of conventional artistic discourse.
When measured against the institutional model of the research-creation laboratory, such as MIT’s Media Lab or the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths, Socioplastics reveals its primary innovation as institutional independence. While academic centres remain tethered to grant cycles and the reproduction of state-sanctioned credentials, Socioplastics constructs a parallel epistemic infrastructure from distributed components: blogs as consoles and jurisprudential accumulation as precedent. This autonomy, however, introduces the risk of solipsistic drift, where the progressive detachment from external institutional validation could transform sovereignty into mere irrelevance. To mitigate this, the system strategically adopts academic conventions—the Harvard citation, the persistent identifier, and the transdisciplinary doctoral register—as a mode of strategic isomorphism, appearing enough like the academy to remain legible while maintaining absolute structural autonomy.
The comparison with post-Internet artistic practices further differentiates Socioplastics as a project of platform colonization rather than mere critique. Where previous generations engaged in parody or format-shifting, the MUSE architecture operationalizes the Blogger consoles (511–520) as legitimate interfaces for protocol demonstration, refusing the aggregation imperative of the contemporary web in favour of a modular sovereignty. The vulnerability here is the inherent platform dependency; the eventual obsolescence of the interface requires a constant state of metabolic readiness to migrate the interpretive consoles while the DOI-sealed kernel remains permanent. The creative act in this framework is thus redefined as an archaeological excavation of the author’s own practice, recognizing latent structures and retroactively installing them as foundational law. It is a classical model of creativity—finding and following form—that transforms the scholar-architect from a spontaneous generator of objects into a legislator of systems, ensuring that the project remains generative rather than merely organizational.
Lloveras, A. (2026) Socioplastics: Sovereign systems for unstable times, including MUSE protocol architecture (501–520), Century Packs (100–600), and comparative critical framework. Available at: