The thing about memory is that it’s never entirely honest. It reshapes itself in the telling, reframes the moments we cling to as though they always meant something. Looking back, I see all these fragmented pieces of a year. La Lucha premiered in Bolivia. I remember standing there, people around me clapping, their faces filled with joy. I felt exhausted. Sensory overloaded.
I think about London and my first exhibition, something coded in AR. I hyperfocused so intensely that I don’t remember much. It felt strange to see people interacting with something I had created, their reactions playing out in real time. It felt
as though I had built a tiny universe for them to walk through, and I could only watch from the outside.
I was selected as a Salzburg Fellow, spending a week in a castle discussing AI and building another community. In the end, that’s what truly matters.
In Montreal, I co-created a 3D character with its own intuition. Four AI systems interacted with each other, weaving a dialogue that felt alive, something beyond what I had anticipated. It wasn’t just code; it was a window into what collaboration between systems might become. And I wasn’t alone in this. Eilif, Rohan, Milton, Mariane, and Yasmeen were there too. Their ideas, their energy, and their presence made it feel like a shared moment, not just mine.
Then there are the faces of the people I met. Vitalik Buterin, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Glen Weyl, the Crypto Punks. A strange collision between the ordinary and the extraordinary. The photos tell me it all happened, but the memories feel exaggerated, like someone else lived them. The ideas of civic technology started to seed, something that felt practical and revolutionary all at once.
And there was film futurism, this idea I’ve been carrying like a secret, trying to articulate it out loud. It’s not just about the medium. It’s about creating entirely new ways to experience stories, to immerse yourself in them.
Then there was Suji Yan, a meeting that felt like a crossing of worlds. We talked about ideas I hadn’t even dared to articulate yet. Suji understood it intuitively. With Dan, we explored concepts like co-creating an AI agent or being, something more than code. A collaborator, a reflection, something that could think alongside us and create alongside us.
And the co-creation in Tainan, another kind of collaboration, another kind of world-building. It wasn’t just technology. It was the people, the ideas, the way they made me feel like I was part of something larger, something infinite. Also, decentralized ID became a real thing, something that started as a conversation and grew into something tangible.
In Athens, Istanbul, Taiwan, and Japan, I found pieces of myself in places I hadn’t yet known I was missing. Cities blurred into one another, each one giving me something. A golden card, a new perspective, or just the realization that I could still fall in love with a place.
But most of all, I think of Suri, her laughter cutting through the noise, the only part of the year that felt like it belonged entirely to me.
The story of a year never feels linear. It loops, twists, and folds back on itself. Memory is just another version of fantasy, and when I look at this collage, I’m not sure if I’m remembering it all or simply imagining how it could have been. In the end, though, it’s the co-creation that stays with me. Whether with AI, humans, or the spaces between them, this year was about building something together.
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