Crosby Studios and 22 System Turn Electrical Outlets Into Art.

Crosby Studios at Matter and Shape. Photography: Jenia Filatova.

What happens when a power socket stops being background noise and becomes the whole point? That’s the provocation at the heart of Plug-It, a collaborative installation by 22 System and Crosby Studios that debuted at Matter and Shape in Paris earlier this month.

At the centre of the exhibit is a large mirrored artwork composed of multicoloured electrical sockets. Visitors are invited to plug in objects, search for power, and engage directly with the work. There’s no passive viewing here—the installation exists fully only through participation, with each interaction altering the composition in real time. It’s live, mutable, and deliberately incomplete without an audience.

Distributed throughout are new outlets finished in Bleu Connecté, a new 22 System colourway that recurs throughout Crosby Studios’ broader body of work. The blue outlet functions simultaneously as a conceptual device and a working utility—a neat bit of design thinking that suspends familiar readings of infrastructure and asks us to see the socket, truly see it, perhaps for the first time.

“Plug-It reconnects what was once unnecessary and forgotten, bringing it back into play. It’s a system where people can build their own compositions, and where switching on and off becomes a quiet reflection on how both objects and humans move through cycles of presence and absence,” says Harry Nuriev, Founder and Creative Director of Crosby Studios.

This year’s Matter and Shape theme of Scale provided the conceptual scaffolding, with the installation guided by Crosby Studios’ signature philosophy of Transformism—where function becomes expression, infrastructure becomes medium, and art, technology, and everyday life operate as a single integrated system shaped through collective participation.

Beyond the fair, the exhibition extends to Crosby Studios’ permanent gallery space in Paris’s 6th arrondissement (8 Rue des Beaux-Arts), where six editioned versions of the mirrored artwork—produced at A3 scale—are available for purchase alongside a unique landscape painting set within an ornate baroque frame, its surface punctuated with outlets. Each edition retains the functional logic of the original, incorporating two working sockets fitted with a uniquely coloured cord and plug.

22 System was originally conceptualised by Omer Arbel and launched in 2009. A patented innovation in integrated electrical products, the system allows electrical and data devices to be seamlessly embedded into a variety of finish materials—minimising visual noise while elevating the everyday into something architecturally considered. Plug-It is perhaps its most radical reframe yet.

Crosby Studios Gallery in Paris. Photography: Jenia Filatova.

Crosby Studios Gallery in Paris. Photography: Jenia Filatova.

[Photography by Jenia Filatova.]