All great cities have been shaped by great art. In times of crisis and change, art doesn’t just reflect resilience—it reveals the hidden layers of our shared experience, weaving connection and meaning through complexity.

Today, in an increasingly interconnected world, art, architecture, and language are more vital than ever. They have the power to illuminate what is concealed by the shadows of opaque systems and distant platforms, making the unseen visible.

What if we could redesign the tools we use, embedding them with values of inclusion, transparency, and creativity? What if art could not only map the unmapped and narrate the untold but help us imagine and build the impossible?

Can we change the parameters of the world we live in?

We are building the digital 'artitechture' of the future with standards and open protocols that foreground collective creative practice. Trustworthy metadata, transparent ownership structures, and autonomous agency enable us to give credit where it's due and support each other to build a fairer, funner, and more inclusive society. Then we begin to see the spaces and connections between objects and people, and to understand the transcontextual interdependence. We are creating warm data by giving communities on the ground access and the ability to experience their complexity.₁

Therefore, we can move towards:

1. facilitating inclusion and debate
2. enabling tangibility of the textual, visual and sensorial language

FacilitATing inclusion and debate

Immutability Enabled by the cryptographic mechanisms

Combinability Enabled by programmable smart contracts

Making textual and visual language tangible

On Web2 digital infrastructure, metadata generated by posting images or text is collected by a central entity, most likely a large multi-billion corporation and harvested to generate ad revenue for the company.

On Web3 digital architecture, the textual and visual language is created and stored in a way that the creator of the data can track and trace the asset's movement through the internet and retain ownership of it even after it's shared with a third party.

Therefore, the benefits of immutability and combinability can:

• ensure art lives on as it makes its journey through different hands

• enable ideas to be built on top of each other and extended through a diverse set of eyes

• multi-network effects can be engaged (not just benefit to the company from a two-sided market)

• add functionality and activity (not passive consumption)

We are looking beyond monetary values to include the technical, the aesthetic, the material, and the emotional to become more in touch with our humanity.

We can code tools that respect and amplify the diversity of views and cultures. Decentralised tech can help to make sense of the multicultural world and keep track of changing sensory data in real-time.

It's not just an instrumental tool; it's a way of narrating a story and creating touchpoints with the uncanny and the unknown. It fosters vitality, enabling spaces where relationships can spark new relationships.

The future of design is the ability to design highly controlled systems that enable the loss of control. Here, boundless creativity plays a big part. Creation becomes about letting go and beginning again and again because letting go enables empowerment and emergence.₂ It's a constant dance between who you are and who you want to be, opening new possibilities. We cannot be confined to one kind of experience anymore as we risk getting stuck as identity of space inevitably gets moulded over time.

Thinking of art as a spatial entity helps us inhabit it, embedding values through practice and creating community-based incentives rather than centrally controlled algorithmic ones, which creates a shared reality. As "perceptual expectations shape conscious experience"₃, the hope is that new abundances are made possible, but not based on material addiction or consumption₄.

We will have to get used to doing things we've never done before and find that we are good at things we never knew we had in us. At times, we might get disoriented by the sheer volume of novelty. But that only helps us get into a new orientation.₅

We are mapping uncharted territory, but this time, we won't fall into the trap of recontextualising feedback loops as another configuration of Western bias. The definition of normal was imposed on us by the industrialised society, where control was the modus operandi. This time, we will need new democratic infrastructure - how to narrate the world around us and create a more fitting theory of value.

And that's what we're exploring and experimenting with in emergent cultural pockets.

References:

₁ Bateson, N. (2024) Warmdatalab.net

₂ Oxman, N. (2016). Age of entanglement. Journal of Design and Science.

₃ Huxley, A. (1968). The doors of perception. London: Chatto and Windus.

₄ Dark Matter Labs (2024) *Introducing Life-Ennobling Economics *

₅ Nora Bateson and Douglas Rushkoff (2023) on Team Human Podcast