The Woodlawn Initiative researches, designs, and actively aims to bring about a more rewarding, profitable, and sustainable relationship between the physical world we inhabit and invisible systems, infrastructure, agents, digital technologies, and power structures.
Our Mission
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This connection between realms plays a significant role in shaping how the world in which we live is framed, constructed, maintained, and controlled. It holds forces that underpin our habits, habitat, and culture while also driving markets, businesses, power structures, and belief systems. Some characterizations of these invisible forces include the digital realm, governmental apparatuses and bureaucracy, hidden infrastructure, the psychological dimension, imagination and dreams, and religions and ideologies. Over the last century, these systems have become extremely adept at creating and controlling our world. Simultaneously, they have been increasingly operated by a cohort resistant to change and fearful of losing control. The result is a situation where these systems may no longer be widely beneficial and may be doing active harm.
As this occurs, a new generation of companies, apparatuses, capital flows, and power structures is actively challenging legacy organizations. Satellite technology, private space exploration, artificial intelligence, and industry 4.0 driven by sensors, drones, and robots, have all created new opportunities to link the physical and digital while also redistributing access to power and wealth. At the same time, an increasing concentration of wealth is causing a rift in society that may foreclose many experiencing this potentially miraculous future.
Our goal is to understand how this bridge between realms operates today in order to design a more productive relationship. We aim to create a space to discover what the future of this intersection can be and who it can benefit. We are doing so through 3 primary initiatives that aim to move the conversation forward via research, projects, products, and events. Each initiative both invites a range of collaborators to contribute while also creating room for organizations whose work intersects with these initiatives to draw upon our insights through bespoke advisory services.
Three Primary Initiatives:
Spatial & Cultural Intelligence
Large Language Models understand digital information but lack awareness of the physical and cultural worlds where human creativity takes place. Developing a new intelligence grounded in spatial, material, and cultural data would enable more effective tools for cultural producers—helping them design, plan, and manage their work while unlocking new efficiencies and opportunities across creative industries.
The Representation of Wealth
Wealth today is increasingly abstract, concealed behind complex financial structures and disconnected from the visible cultural and material expressions that once signified it. As this opacity grows, the cultural economy struggles to sustain itself, revealing an urgent need to reinterpret and reconnect wealth, value, and cultural production across generations in ways that restore continuity and creative vitality.
Power and the Culture Industry
Throughout history, culture and politics have been deeply intertwined, with artists, designers, and institutions both shaping and critiquing political power—sometimes fueling social revolutions and at other times reinforcing dominant ideologies. Today, despite cultural producers’ unprecedented ability to influence public discourse and imagine alternative futures, they remain largely disconnected from political leadership, revealing the need for new forms of agency, representation, and coalition-building that integrate cultural imagination into governance.
