I had an honour to be an ARTeCHÓ fellow amongst a brilliant group of colleagues artists researchers over the course of last couple of years with residency, projects and events in Milan [IT], Eindhoven [NL], Zaragoza [ES] and online. This EU supported fellowship was brilliantly welded together by the teams of Baltan Laboratories, MEET Digital Culture Center & Etopia Centro de Emprendimiento and an exceptional list of contributors. This November the fellowship programme culminated at the event in Milan’s @meet.digitalculturecenter where I held a keynote and a presentation of a prototype of my ongoing [Aura]{Protocol} public space initiative based on the premise that web3 technologies, decentralised stacks and some collective action could help us reclaim the agency and co-curation of visual content in urbanised public spaces.

The premise of the proposal that I’m looking forward to bring into fruition in the near future is as follows:

If the rise of advertising has created an economy of perverse order, where demand in a market can be both created and met rather than matched against supply, then we might as well invert the order of who controls advertising space, its scale, time, or content. In other words, if advertising has hacked the market, why don’t we hack advertising in return? Why do we even call space ‘public’ when, in fact, we lack the agency to determine its nature? Neither do we have the agency to shape the architecture of a space, nor can we choose what we see or communicate.

Massive thanks goes to everyone involved in organising this brilliant project including the teams of MEET (Milan, ITA), Etopia (Zargoza, ESP), Baltan Laboratories (Eindhove, NL) and others.