Geschützt: An extraterestrial value machine

»How do you sustain genuine participation in a thought experiment when there is nothing material to win?«

Dear Lam Lai, could you walk us through your project and the core ideas that shaped its development?

Act 0: Fill the Cargo for the Red Planet asks whether distributed communities can collectively decide what cultural values deserve to survive, and how. The Mars framing is the condition that makes this possible. The question of moving to another planet belongs to everyone. Within that fictional frame, participants submit responses to prompts, vote on others’ entries, and collectively determine what reaches the cargo archive through labor-based validation. The core argument is that time and attention can serve as the basis for collective value.

What drew you to work with blockchain structures in this project, and what new possibilities did this medium open up for you?

What drew me to blockchain was not the technology itself, but one specific property –permanence without a gatekeeper. The cargo archive needed to outlast any single institution, server, or platform. Blockchain offered exactly that: a record that cannot be changed or deleted by anyone, including the project team. What opened up was the retrieval architecture – I explored using Merkle tree structures, so that anyone can independently verify any cargo entry against the on-chain root hash, without trusting the project team. The authenticity of a single entry can be confirmed mathematically. Here, decentralization is infrastructure for cultural permanence.

At what stage did blockchain become essential to your process, and were there moments when its use felt limiting, excessive, or conceptually challenging?

From early in the residency, one constraint was clear: Participants should never need a crypto wallet. Blockchain had to be invisible to them. This shaped everything, pushing the architecture toward a project-controlled wallet that signs transactions automatically, with no friction for participants whatsoever. The conceptually challenging moment was deciding what actually belongs on-chain. Storing everything would be expensive and unnecessary. Storing nothing would lose the permanence. The answer was minimal, only cryptographic fingerprints, not content. Only the mark that something was chosen, not what it said.

How did the residency shape your practice? Could you reflect on what you learned and how exchanges with fellow participants influenced your work?

The residency reawakened skills from an earlier part of my practice that I had set aside for years: system design. Returning to that thinking, now combined with AI–assisted development tools, allowed me to realize ideas in code that would previously have required a full technical team. The regular group meetings with fellow participants were unexpectedly valuable. Presenting current problems to the group and receiving feedback from people working across different disciplines sharpened my thinking at critical moments. Seeing how others approached technical and conceptual challenges also opened new ways of solving problems I hadn’t considered.

What frictions, constraints, or questions were you aiming to explore or challenge through this project?

The central friction was this: How do you sustain genuine participation in a thought experiment when there is nothing material to win? Most engagement systems rely on constant reward loops, like points, status, financial incentives. This project deliberately removes all of that. You cannot profit from what gets archived. You cannot build a career on your role level. The only thing the system offers is the experience of thinking together about something that doesn’t exist yet. The challenge was designing mechanics that reward the imagination itself, not through prizes or tokens, but by making the act of collective reflection feel meaningful enough to return to.

How do you envision the trajectory of your project beyond the residency period?

The trajectory beyond the residency is clear: Secure funding, build a dedicated development team, and commission UX and UI design. The system architecture is documented. The prototypes prove the core mechanics work. What remains is the full build. Once built, the platform opens to partner communities for a mission period of four to eight months. Validated by collective judgment, the cargo archive that accumulates then becomes source material for theatrical, published, or exhibited work depending on available resources and partnerships. The system is the first act. What gets made from the archive is the consequence.

What are your thoughts on the project’s long-term sustainability – both in technical terms and within a broader social or cultural context?

Technical sustainability is the honest challenge. The architecture is designed for minimal infrastructure, lightweight hosting during the mission, and negligible blockchain anchoring costs at closure. But maintenance, development, and operational support require sustained funding. This is the structural reality of all cultural digital infrastructure. The cultural sustainability is a different question. This may be the first time communities across different geographies and backgrounds collectively validate what deserves to survive through weeks of thoughtful participation.

Barbara Cueto conducted this interview in collaboration with Sarah Donderer (Solitude Digital Cultures)