Future Arts Way is a
2.5 mile interactive walking path through Downtown Seattle.
Augmented reality rooted in community stories that inspire, educate, and connect visitors and locals to business, histories, and futures reimagined & mapped back on to the land.
Launching During FIFA World Cup,
STAYing for the community until end of the year.
Changing Seattle’s History
With a projected 500K+ people coming through Seattle for World Cup, it is is a rare moment to reclaim our city as a cultural, arts, and innovation leader in the world’s eye, not just a technology hub.
We aim to create meaningful storytelling with technology that uplifts local community stories untold. Technology will be shown as a tool to unearth important stories, bring commerce to local businesses, while engaging with a unique, interactive open air gallery walking path.
How it Works (MAP)
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“I know where to go and how to get there”
Take our your phone. Open a custom designed, curated map of Downtown Seattle. Follow the journey from the North Trailhead to the South Trailhead alongside businesses - check out the AR story and go inside the business to engage with what our vibrant Seattle community stories have to offer. -
"I’m learning about Seattle’s culture both physically and digitally”
We are installing 10-20 vinyl launchpads alongside a clearly marked path, on sidewalks and storefronts of curated community businesses and art spaces. Local Coast Salish histories and futures co-created through community gatherings & Afrofuturism - themed stories will open when you scan a QR code at each stop. -
“The largest AR artwork in the world is in Seattle”
Follow the path to the epicenter of 3rd and pine to find the corner building wrapped in vinyl. Beautiful Afrocentric and Coast Salish themed ethnobotany blooms out of it. A waterfall flows back onto the land, filling the streets with healing waters.
Meet the Team
Currents Cohort
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Azure Bleu Boure
Suquamish Tribe
I am the Traditional Food and Medicine Program Coordinator for Suquamish. I teach how to gather, prepare and process foods and medicine for my community. I was elected to Suquamish Tribal Council in March 2024. The work I do with gathering our foods and medicines is integral to my job and who I am as a person. Every year I assist with our Tribal school Ocean to Table curriculum where we teach the students to catch, process, smoke and can salmon. I am also involved with Indigenous Aquaculture Organization through Sea Grant. -

Daniel R. Smith
Swinomish
Daniel R. Smith is an artist, curator, and creative director based in Seattle. A Northwest Native enrolled in the Swinomish Tribe, he grew up on the Tulalip Indian Reservation before graduating from the University of Washington with degrees in fine art and graphic design. As a fine artist, he’s exhibited at the Center on Contemporary Art, Gallery 4Culture, Bumbershoot, Bellevue Art Museum, Bainbridge Island Museum of Art, Fresh Mochi, and SOIL gallery. His work can be found in the permanent collections of Seattle City Light, Bainbridge Island Museum of Art, MoPop, SF MoMA, Emory University, Yale University, and University of Washington. He was recently awarded Seattle Art Book Fair’s Page Turner Fellowship to produce a limited edition book of his collage work. Deeply involved in the local design community, he spent a decade organizing poster exhibitions connecting Seattle with cities politically at odds with the U.S., specifically Havana, Tehran, Moscow, and Istanbul.
Find him on instagram at @thenanoforest -

Chenoa Egawa
Lummi and S'Klallam Nations
Chenoa Egawa is Lummi and S’Klallam of Washington State. Her Lummi and S’Klallam grandparents were multilingual, speaking Lummi, S’Klallam, several Coast Salish languages of neighboring tribes, and English. They were carriers of the profound ways of life of the First Peoples – as caretakers of our Mother Earth – through their interrelationship with their homelands and waterways; through their stories, songs, prayers and ways of life.
Chenoa is dedicated to upholding and amplifying the wisdom of her elders and ancestors, sharing teachings about our interconnectedness, our responsibilities to this sacred life, to one another and to the Natural world. She is a ceremonial leader, medicine carrier, singer, speaker, published author (The Whale Child and Tani’s Search for the Heart), artist and nature photographer. She is also a Senior Level Qigong Instructor through the Ling Gui International Healing Qigong School.
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Tj WhiteAntelope
Children of Setting Sun, Lummi Nation
I’m learning how to carry my People with me, how to stay grounded when I’m far from home, how to speak truth even when it makes folks uncomfortable.
Today, I carry all of it—my people, my past, my stubborn heart—into Indigenous-led storytelling, film, and community building. We don’t wait for approval. We build what we need. We speak, sing, and fight for the future our ancestors dreamed. -

Nychelle Schneider
Snoqualmie Tribe
I am a Two Spirit artist, an author, and enrolled member of the sduk"albix™/Snoqulamie Nation located in Snoqualmie, Washington. My published work and artworks include Prayer of Silence with Island Ink, sales with Salish Lodge and private collections.
I am a highly regarded visual artist who has received public and private commissions and had work widely displayed in galleries and museums, both in the United States and Canada. Addition-ally, l've led visual arts workshops with schools and is an active contributor in tribal community on various committees.
My work focuses on representing those with disabilities, indigenous, queer and two spirit groups within my writing and artwork. You can follow me on instagram @mistletoetrex -

Ash Frantz
Makah
Ash is a multidisciplinary artist based in Seattle, WA. Their work explores the body as an extension of land through video and installation. Their work weaves identity, queer temporality, and Indigenous presence into forms that remain in motion.
Find them on instagram @ash.frantz
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Jenée Redecker
Confederated Tribes of the Chehalis Reservation
I am an enrolled member of the Chehalis Tribe and the founder of Salish Glimmer and Greenery, established in 2025. As both a wild harvester and artist, my work celebrates Indigenous culture and the natural world.
I’ve participated in a mural project in Olympia and showcased my art at Olympia Artwalk and Centralia Artrails. My work is currently available at Daybreak Star Indian Cultural Center in Seattle, Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, YUBEC in Fremont, and the Suquamish Museum gift shop.
Beyond creating art and plant remedies, I’m dedicated to cultural preservation through teaching. I’ve led workshops on salve-making and tea-blending at tribal events and community gatherings, helping others connect with traditional plant knowledge and develop their own relationships with medicinal plants. -

Valerie Segrest & Mazzy Ungaro
Muckleshoot
Valerie Segrest is an Indigenous food systems practitioner, nutrition educator, and writer whose work is rooted in Indigenous knowledge, food sovereignty, and place-based approaches to health.
Her and her daugher, Mazzy, are members of the Muckleshoot Tribe. Valerie’s life’s work is deeply informed by the lands, waters, and foodways of the Salish Sea region.
Segrest’s work emerges from long-standing relationships with community, elders, educators, and land. Rather than treating food as an isolated intervention, she approaches nourishment as a living system — shaped by ecology, culture, history, and responsibility. Her practice is guided by an ethic of care: doing work thoroughly, thoughtfully, and in ways that honor the time it takes to build trust and get things right.
Find more of Valerie’s work at https://www.valeriesegrest.com/
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Lu AfterBuffalo
Jamestown S'klallam
Lu is a citizen of the Jamestown S'Klallam Tribe with roots in the Nooksack Tribe through her grandmother, Jean Cooper. She runs her own business creating traditional and traditional-adjacent regalia, jewelry, and accessories, and works to make traditional materials accessible by harvesting and trading cedar bark, nettle, salmon leather, sweetgrass, shell, and more — practicing her treaty rights through every gather.
Lu serves on the Jamestown S'Klallam Tribe Cultural Committee and has worked with the Tribe's Traditional Foods and Culture program, supporting Canoe Journey, salmon ceremony, and community cultural workshops. Her art and her activism are inseparable: salmon motifs thread through her jewelry and weavings, salmon leather and bone appear in her baskets and skirts, and the health of salmon habitat anchors everything she cares about. As she puts it — there isn't a part of her work as a weaver or gatherer that salmon hasn't touched.
A Mixed Reality XR Installation at 3rd & Pine, Seattle and across Downtown Seattle.
Blending Coast Salish flora and fauna knowledge, Afrofuturism, and Pacific Northwest ecologies, this artwork reimagines our relationship with nature through ancestral wisdom and multi-sensory storytelling.
Inspired by previously created Future Arts projects and local community research, like Divine Ndemeye’s Parasitic Healing Bath (2023) and Alina Nazmeeva’s Currents AR salmon run (2022, 2024), this installation builds on Ndemeye’s plant-based ethnobotanical designs and symbologies stewarded with local Coast Salish ethnobotanist and artist Bri Castilleja with salmon migration visuals by Alina Nazmeeva and Alex Kosnett. In this iteration, gatherings with local Coast Salish stewards and additional communities historically “othered” will be held to continue building an entire new world rooted in historic stories and futuristic hopes and dreams. Together with soundscapes led by local musician and multimedia artist Alexis Eggertsen, OTHER EARTH becomes a portal of healing, celebration, and ecological reconnection to ancestry and Indigeneity of any passerby, while grounding in the local waterways and buried ethnobotanical histories beneath downtown Seattle.
At its core, OTHER EARTH reclaims the word “Other” as a source of strength and vision. It uplifts Indigenous, Black, diasporic, and non-Western perspectives—historically “othered”, offering a space where difference is celebrated, and biodiversity means a strong earth that leans on each other. Rooted in regeneration, resilience, and Nature as Queen, this work invites the public into a vibrant future of stewardship, radical abundance, and vibrant possibility.
Curatorial Theme: Other Earth 2026
THE VINYL LAUNCHPADS:
A Model for Community Building & Sponsorships
Our project is partnering with local community business and arts centers to highlight vibrant stories that have historically been othered using our interactive wayfinder to learn more about the business and discover Downtown Seattle differently.
Each participating business will become a dedicated AR Launchpad location, installed on the sidewalk near their enterence or in their storefront.
Being a stop on the map is free and offers technology companies and any businesses an opportunity to sponsor a location. If you're interested in sponsoring a location, please join us! There are limited amount of slots.
CIVIC PARTNERS
3rd & Pine LOCATION PARTNERS
THIS PROJECT IS SUPPORTED BY
PRODUCTION & CREATIVE TECHNOLOGY Team
Check out Presentation Below
Sponsor a Launch Pad Location or Partnership Tier
ARtwork Examples:
“New Nature Spawning”
by Nadine Kolodziey
(Germany)
“Emerging Radiance”
by Michelle Kumata, Tani Ikeda
(Seattle), (Seattle/LA)
“Patternity”
by Tafui
(in partnership with VMF Winter Arts)
(Vancouver/Jamaica)
AR+Pops : “Home Here”
by Nina Vichayapai + Houdini Studio
Pops: Ma&Pops
Holder Design: LAMP Lab
(Seattle)
“#GlitchGoddess”
by Marjan Modhaddam
(in partnership with VMF Winter Arts)
(Seattle)
“Currents”
by Alina Nazmeeva , Alex Kosnett
(Boston/Russia), (Portland)


