ÉTÈ — Eternal Terra Ear — is an independent institute for computational governance. We cast sensor signal, law and city infrastructure into a single instrument: so that power can be audited, and trust can be measured.
01 · The instrument
Signal becomes terrain
Radio-frequency spectrum, latency and telemetry are cast into interactive 3D terrain. You stop reading a report and start walking into the data.
02 · Trust
Geometry is the reasoning
Language is too fragile to govern automated infrastructure. Trust is a distance metric, a boundary check, a topological invariant — certified live.
03 · The incubator
Seeding it back into the world
Each year in Berlin we offer resources first, then co-build with immigrants, minorities, artists and engineers. Research becomes real-world impact.
The composer stands on the green slope — EO telemetry interpolated as terrain; data lands as bodies on it, or generate seeded variations. The envelope is policy, trust is membership, geometry is the agent.
Plane · data Box · infrastructure Pyramid · gateway Rod · pipeline Node · datastore Envelope · policy
Elements
Data
Audit
Export
Evidence manifest · C2PA-shaped
snapshot
…
02
Trust-as-a-Service — geometry as the reasoning engine
Language is too fragile to govern automated infrastructure. Trust is a distance metric, a boundary check, a topological invariant.
Systemic trust certificate
live invariants
…
Register 1 · Transactional
Every datum, boundary-checked
Each check emits a C2PA-shaped record into the manifest stream.
Register 2 · Systemic
The shape itself is certified
Betti numbers, curvature, hull hash — a certificate over the system's shape, chainable to auditors. A million clean transactions cannot fake a healthy topology.
Freedom, affect, power — mapped with the same certainty as points, lines, and planes. The topology is the philosophical composition; the composition can be varied. — after Spinoza, Ethica, 1677
03
Methodology — the three-tier pipeline
Capture, model, mediate civic interventions in low-altitude airspace — through provenance, privacy, and jurisdictional translation.
Tier 1 · Provenance
Ingestion indexes orientation
Contributor orientation is indexed, so airspace models cannot collapse into corporate optimization.
Tier 2 · Privacy
Anonymized at collection
Tokenized cryptography strips identity at the point of collection — watch the ring take the color from each contribution.
Tier 3 · Civic impact
Refracted through jurisdictional lenses
Aggregates are stress-tested across conflicting sovereign regimes, yielding the Civic Airspace Charter and policy briefings.
04
Evidence registry — /evidence
Every dataset, query, and manifest — publicly browsable. The citable page.
CASE 001 · IR-2019-11 · recomputed from public telemetry
verified event
On 16 November 2019, following fuel-price protests, Iranian authorities ordered a shutdown: cellular operators disconnected first around 14:00 local, and by 19:00 the country entered digital darkness — international connectivity down to roughly 4–5%. The near-total blackout held until 10:00 on 21 November: 111 hours. During the window, security forces killed at least 304 people; the domestic intranet stayed online. The event is cross-verified by four independent sources: IODA (BGP / active probing / telescope signals), OONI (measurements still arriving from 49 networks — proof the blackout was not total), Google traffic data, and the Amnesty International × Hertie School forensic investigation.
schematic reconstruction anchored to documented signal levels (100% → ~4–5% → recovery); not the raw series. sources: ooni.org/post/2019-iran-internet-blackout · ioda.inetintel.cc.gatech.edu · iran-shutdown.amnesty.org · pulse.internetsociety.org
…
CASE 002 · TO-2022-01 · single-point fragility
verified event
On 15 January 2022, the Hunga Tonga–Hunga Haʻapai eruption severed Tonga's only international subsea cable (~827 km to Fiji), cutting nearly all internet connectivity for a population of ~105,000. Mainline repair took about five weeks, restored 22 February; limited satellite links carried government traffic in between. Compiled constraint: critical connectivity requires redundant paths (ITU resilience guidance) — membership test: FAILED — one cable, no redundancy. The case shows fragility becoming a measurable governance fact without any actor violating anything.
Live forensic records · autonomously generated by the agents · C2PA-shaped
R&D 01
05
The ÉTÈ Incubator · /incubator
Not a conference: a philanthropy-based engine for recruiting seeds. Nov 5–7, 2026 · Berlin Science Week · Motion Lab, Berlin. We offer first, then we co-decide together.
▣
Past events
Images are from our past events, made with citizens, immigrants, queer people, artists and creative technologists.
Drag to spin · click to view
01 WE OFFER FIRST — resources, networks and technical validators on the table, no screening before the offer. 02 YOU BRING THE PROJECT — art, research, writing, robotics, organizational making. 03 IF IT ALIGNS, WE MATCH — then we decide together how to build it, and index it in a public repository.
Vision
Planting seeds for 2027
Static treaties are giving way to dynamic, software-mediated boundaries. The Incubator is an antidisciplinary bridge through institutional silos.
Metric
Distributed, real-world impact
We record your exact needs, match them with active resources, and set concrete metrics for what we can achieve together.
Scope
Is this for you?
No rigid disciplinary lines. We hope your work resonates with human rights, digital rights and critical infrastructure. We particularly welcome immigrants, minorities and queer people.
◇
Incubation tracks
01
Internet Blackout & Digital Rights
Open-source tools as an epistemic shield: verifiable data provenance even during shutdowns. Led by technical experts from ÉTÈ and partners.
02
Cybersecurity & the Asian Developmental Perspective
Resilient trust corridors and safeguarding critical infrastructure under crisis conditions. Led by Pedro H. Tavares.
03
AI Metaphysics & Speculative Legal Tech
The resource metabolism of AI, and decentralized multi-agent models as a framework for trustworthy governance. Led by José Antonio Magalhães.
Turning radio-frequency spectrum data and signal latency into interactive 3D terrain meshes. Led by Yidi Wang.
05
Women Leadership in Tech Entrepreneurship
Building resilient cross-border organizations and female-led innovation. Led by Mónica Avella.
06
Open track
If your work sits outside the five, bring it anyway. The track list grows with the needs that get filed.
✲
Keynote guests
Our speakers work at the frontier of speculative law, science diplomacy and open-source infrastructure, bridging academic theory, institutional policy and ground-level engineering.
Pedro H. Tavares
Track 02
Leading researcher across the Asian Development Bank, UN ESCAP and the ITU; a cybersecurity technology advocate. pedrohtavares.com
José Antonio Magalhães
Track 03
Fellow at ICI Berlin, member of the Speculative International Law lab at Queen Mary University of London, and postdoctoral researcher with Yuk Hui at Erasmus University Rotterdam. Reconstructs modern legal theory (Kelsen, Pashukanis, Schmitt) through speculative realism.
→
Next · Munich
Nov 23–24, 2026
OGC iDays 2026 · Munich
Yidi Wang speaks as a keynote for ÉTÈ Institute, alongside Ingo Simonis (CTO, OGC), Markus Mohl (Head of Geoservices and Digital Twin, City of Munich) and Peter Rabley (OGC).
Nov 25–27, 2026
Digital Building Permit Conference
Immediately after iDays: 3D city models and cadastre, above- and below-ground infrastructure, AI-ready city data and decision-supporting urban digital twins.
The link
Berlin ↔ Munich
The Incubator and the Munich standards forum answer each other: seeds planted in Berlin carry into the standards and smart-city government conversation in Munich.
OGC iDays 2026 · digital foundations for smarter cities, infrastructure and constructionDigital Building Permit Conference 2026 · keynote speakers
◎
How organizations & philanthropy get involved
Money buys access and collaboration, never the outcome or the text.
Main-stage integration, the first cohort of conformance testing, a jointly published implementation report.
Boundary
No vote, no veto, no curation of Bluebook content.
B
Technical Validator & Endorser
Who
Open-source foundations, academic labs, civil society networks, standards working groups.
Gets
Your model and tooling exercised in the live sandbox, with test reports indexed in the public registry.
Boundary
No guaranteed favourable result; the sandbox is deterministic and failures are published too.
C
Philanthropic / Grantmaking Partner
Who
Funders of internet freedom, digital rights and critical infrastructure.
Gets
Direct alignment with the 2027 Sovereign Spatial Bluebook and co-design of the 2027 seed-grant cohort.
Boundary
Funding does not buy technical reality.
RIGHTS FIRST — where a commercial requirement and a rights protection conflict, the rights protection wins and the conflict is documented publicly. NO PAID INFLUENCE — nobody holds a veto over the technical realities of a project. TRANSPARENT INDEXING — co-developed submissions and models enter a public repository. MUTUAL OPT-IN — resources come first, unconditionally; co-development requires mutual agreement.
Apply · Incubator 2026
partnership@ete.institute
One way in: write to partnership@ete.institute. No forms, no pitch competition.
The project – three sentences: what it is, where it is stuck.
The need – a tool, a network, a validator, funding or a venue.
You – a five-line bio and links.
Track and days – which track, and which of Nov 5 / 6 / 7.
How can computational systems remain understandable, contestable and governable as societies shift from legal text to algorithmic infrastructure? Each laboratory holds one face of that question.
The institute is organized as four laboratories, not a collection of disconnected projects. Each lab holds one face of the question: whether geometry can carry governance (Lab 1); whether law can be computed and stay contestable (Lab 2); whether industry and the built environment can answer for their obligations (Lab 3); and whether institutions themselves can be designed and experimented upon (Lab 4). Prototype stages, snapshot data and asserted invariants are labeled on the instrument surface itself.
LAB 1
Geometrical Governance
spatial composition · organizational geometry · topology · satellite systems
Problem: the objects of governance are spatial — orbital slots, spectrum, low-altitude corridors, organizational structures. Method: compile them into checkable geometry: composition, topology, the satellite layer. Instruments: the Landscape Instrument v8 · the Composer & green slope · the trust polytope · the six-window front instrument.
LAB 2
Computational Law
ai auditing · legal complexity · contestability · infrastructure compliance
Problem: obligations are written for humans but enforced against computational systems. Method: compile law into executable audit geometry — compliance as membership test, every breach a signed record. Instruments: the Governance Graph prototype · the trust engine & forensic loop · DSA/AI-Act/CSDDD/co-determination schema pilots · the registry.
LAB 3
Industrial Intelligence
bim · digital twins · construction ai · infrastructure governance
Problem: twins that represent infrastructure do not answer for it. Method: build twins that do — IFC in, codes compiled, agents audit, signed compliance out; the bilingual EU + GB standards library is a capability no one else holds. Current work: the BIM/twin compliance pilot · the OUIM & ISH engines · Beijing BIM-AI field research · AMYGDALA, the encrypted edge-sentinel robotics unit (concept: spatial recognition and alerting that only stores and decodes signals — a witness, never a controller; non-military by design).
LAB 4
Institution Design
collective structures · governance experiments
Problem: institutions are usually inherited, not designed. Method: design collective structures and run governance experiments on them — no slot without a socket, one sandbox case per organization, the three-monies firewall, the never-for-sale registry. Current experiments: the ÉTÈ Incubator & its three sockets · the Bluebook open assembly · the Sandbox · the institute's own governance model.
Problem: memory institutions store, but can they mourn? Method: cultural and anthropological forensics — memorial culture, cybernetic mourning, practices of archival refusal; storing what is most human in the most humanless space, and asking how a system ontologically unable to mourn could translate mourning. Current work: the Ritual Memory Datacenter — a memorial drafted collectively.
Nuclear power plants, waste repositories and fuel supply corridors are not abstract legal text — they are concrete physical space. With GIS and 3D spatial modelling, nuclear governance and its contested data become a contestable spatial surface: a repository siting is an envelope, a safety perimeter a half-space, a transport corridor checkable geometry.
Lab 2 · public auditing
Nuclear data governance & transparency
What the nuclear sector lacks most is comprehensibility and public trust. An open civil-auditing instrument renders safety envelopes, monitoring telemetry and compliance states as objects any citizen can inspect, recompute and contest — squarely on Europe's frontier concern of nuclear safety × public trust × AI digital governance.
status: research direction (Lab 1 × Lab 2) · seeking data & institutional partners · partnership@ete.institute
Applied domain · Lab 1 × Lab 2
Nuclear governance — spatialization & public auditing
The premise: nuclear plants, waste repositories and fuel supply routes are not abstract statutes but concrete physical space — therefore compilable into geometry: siting envelopes, transport corridors, repository topology, a contestable spatial surface. The gap: what the nuclear sector lacks most is public comprehensibility. The institute's open civil-auditing instrument places public telemetry (EURDEP, the European radiological data exchange; IAEA PRIS reactor data) and compiled safety frameworks (Euratom safeguards) in one recomputable model — where civil nuclear safety, public trust and digital governance meet. Civil applications only; military use is excluded at the level of our Terms.
PUBLICATIONS — Methodology (published open at ete.institute; archival DOI pending) · Sovereign Spatial Bluebook (annual; to parliamentary committees Dec 2026) · working-paper series · forensic case reports.
FLAGSHIPS — The Instrument (Lab 1) · The ÉTÈ Incubator & Bluebook (Lab 4) · The Open Evidence Registry (Lab 2 · never for sale).
A
About — an independent institute for computational governance
We audit smart cities, IoT and critical infrastructure, drawing on antidisciplinary talent around the globe, and hand over the signed records the instruments produce.
ÉTÈ Institute (Eternal Terra Ear · 永地耳) is an independent research institute for computational governance, fiscally hosted by Open Source Europe in Brussels, working bilingually in English and Chinese across Brussels, Berlin and Beijing. We hold one thesis: as governance migrates from legal text to algorithmic infrastructure, it remains legitimate only if verification is constructive.
Commitment 01
Constructive verification
Every claim we make about a system is backed by a model a third party can run.
Commitment 02
Evidence over assertion
Outputs are cryptographically signed, hash-anchored and archived; methodology published in the open. Our results do not require trusting us.
Commitment 03
Contestability by design
The communities monitored by a model must be able to inspect, recompute and challenge it — a design requirement, not an ethics annex.
INDEPENDENCE & FUNDING — three monies, strictly separated. Sponsorship buys technical embedding (ingestion slots, schema compilation) — never editorial control. Grants fund the commons: the open registry, free audit queries for journalists and human-rights NGOs, bursaries. Investment enters only the service entity — never the protocol or registry, which are held for the commons in perpetuity. The registry is not for sale; that sentence is our governance model. Dual-use here means investigative and commercial — never military.
◇
The framework — one diagram
T
The team
Listed without hierarchy. Each person holds one working face of the institute, and together they carry the instrument, the registry and the Incubator.
Yidi Lola Wang 汪一笛
Founder of ÉTÈ; infrastructure systems architect. Harvard FXB climate advocate; Chinese University of Hong Kong. UN Ocean Decade; World Bank Youth Summit delegate.
Fatemeh Kazemi
Artist and community organiser based in Iran, working on the frequency of grief.
Hadaly Villasclaras
Engineer based in Madrid. Leads technical forensics and compliance integration. Research engineer with TBA21 in Europe.
Joaquina Salgado
Creative technologist based in Berlin. Builds multidimensional boundaries and interactive installations, shown at international art and technology festivals.
Mónica Andrea Avella
International lawyer (Sorbonne Paris 1, LSE), admitted to practise in Colombia. Leads the ÉTÈ women’s leadership entrepreneurship accelerator.
Wutty
Marketing and global communications lead, based in Los Angeles. Works on new-media products and community applications.
◈
Collaborators · 2025 Berlin Science Week edition
The following people and institutions took part in our 2025 Berlin Science Week ETENS edition. Tap a card to read each bio.
Isabella Pasqualini
Institute of Visual Narrative · MA Design, Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts
Architect, artist, scientist
Isabella Pasqualini is an architect (ETHZ 2000), artist and scientist working across architecture and cognitive neuroscience (PhD EPFL 2012). She is currently a lecturer at the Institute of Visual Narrative and the MA Design at the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts. Her works explore the mutual and intimate relationship between body and space through immersive multimedia, with a particular interest in the multisensory enhancement of the user’s horizon. She has been a researcher at the Center of Neuroprosthetics EPFL and the École Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture de Versailles, and a guest lecturer at ZHdK, the Art and Design Academy of Tsinghua University, the School of Engineering and Architecture EPFL and the Städelschule Architecture Class. She has won several international competition prizes and exhibited at international art venues.
Isabel Millar
Philosopher · psychoanalysis and AI
Global Centre for Advanced Studies
“Capacity Reversal Syndrome: On AI and Proletarianization.” Dr Isabel Millar is a philosopher and psychoanalytic theorist from London. She is Professor at the Global Centre for Advanced Studies and author of the critically acclaimed The Psychoanalysis of Artificial Intelligence, so far translated into Chinese, Turkish, Farsi, Spanish, Italian, French, Dutch, German and Arabic. She has been described as one of the UK’s leading young thinkers. Her next book, Patipolitics, is forthcoming with Bloomsbury.
Selena Savić
University of Amsterdam
Artist, architect, assistant professor
“Re-generative Past in AI.” Selena Savić is an artist, architect, and assistant professor at the University of Amsterdam. Her work explores critical and creative approaches to data and its critique at the intersection of informational processes and postcolonial technocracy. She researches, teaches, and writes about digital archives, computational modelling, feminist materialism, and posthuman networks in the context of art, design, and architecture. Her research into the technical, socio-political and environmental aspects of artificial intelligence takes stock of materialist concerns for the ways technology automates performance and creativity, locating a history of measurement in stories of data collection. Rejecting ‘data idealism,’ she studies a proto-history of AI that challenges conventional causalities between technology and society.
Iliana Papadopoulou
Architect · artist · creative developer
Computational media
Iliana Papadopoulou is an architect, artist and creative developer, holding an MArch from Aristotle University and an MSc in Architectural Computation from The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL. Her teaching and research roles at IAAC, CITA and The Bartlett have served as platforms to rethink computational media through multidisciplinary experimentation. At Henning Larsen in Copenhagen she contributed to R&D projects exploring emerging technologies to shape new spatial experiences, with a focus on local communities and diversity. She currently contributes to open-source software repositories alongside her artistic and theoretical projects, experimenting with game engines, web interfaces, 3D sculpting and creative coding. Her work has been exhibited and published internationally, including at the Media Architecture Biennale in Amsterdam, the Tbilisi Architecture Biennale, and the Royal Danish Academy in Copenhagen.
Natalia Jiménez
XAIA · Women of the Future
Future architect, systems thinker
Natalia is a future architect and one of the most influential voices at the intersection of technology, impact and female leadership in Latin America. As co-founder of Lulo X, she transformed it from a spin-off of Colombia’s first fully digital bank into a fintech recognized for its innovation, inclusion and regenerative vision. Today she leads XAIA, a systems-thinking lab and neo-consulting firm where collective intelligence, exponential strategy and regeneration converge. She is also the founder of Women of the Future, a global community that empowers women to lead with purpose, curiosity and compassion in the age of AI. She has been recognized by KPMG, AWS, Forbes and Laboratoria, and awarded iF Design Awards, the STEM Inspiration Award, and a place among the Top 10 Women CEOs in Latin America. “Wealth is not money — it’s freedom, purpose, and shared impact.”
Maria da Piedade Ferreira
Hochschule für Technik Stuttgart (HFT) · Corporeal Architecture
Architect, performance artist, researcher
Dr. Maria da Piedade Ferreira is an architect, performance artist, researcher and curator. Her doctoral thesis “Embodied Emotions: Observations and Experiments in Architecture and Corporeality” (2016) coins her concept of ‘Corporeal Architecture.’ Her work explores the interconnections between architecture, neuroscience and art and has been published and presented internationally, including at the ANFA, eCAADe and IUAV conferences. In 2020, as a response to COVID-19, she founded the YouTube channel Corporeal Architecture, a curatorial project that works as an open-access education and exhibitions room. She has taught at TU Munich, ETH Zürich, TU Kaiserslautern and HFT Stuttgart.
Alejandro Quinto
Community AI
Designer-strategist
Alejandro Quinto is a designer-strategist who turns messy, territorial data into decision-grade tools for governments, industry and communities. Trained in architecture and working across Europe and the UK, he blends geospatial analytics and AI to make complex systems legible, accountable and actionable — especially where procurement, investment and social value intersect. His portfolio ranges from city-scale data platforms to gamified spatial interfaces that open datasets to non-experts. He currently leads innovation at Community AI, guiding product strategy for impact-aligned intelligence, and previously headed innovation at Yeme Tech, delivering the Community Data Platform and the Digital Inclusion Index. His work has been presented at Smart City Expo Barcelona, CARTO London, and the Venice Architecture Biennale.
Mohamed Elshahed
Cairobserver
Independent
Mohamed Elshahed is a writer, curator and critic of architecture whose work extends to design and material culture. He is the author of Cairo Since 1900: An Architectural Guide (AUC Press, 2020) and Rebellious Things: A History of Modern Egypt in Objects, and curated Cairo Modern at New York’s Center for Architecture (2021–22). He earned a Master’s from MIT’s Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture and a PhD from NYU’s Department of Middle Eastern Studies, and curates the British Museum’s Modern Egypt Project. In 2011 he founded Cairobserver, a fluid project with six free printed magazines stimulating public debate on architecture, heritage and urbanism. He was a 2023 Paul Mellon Visiting Senior Fellow at CASVA, National Gallery of Art, and a 2023–24 fellow at Columbia University’s Institute for Ideas & Imagination in Paris.
Ruba Al-Sweel
Writer · artist · curator
Asia Cultural Centre
“FIRST PHONE” — a film developed by Ruba Al-Sweel, followed by remarks. What is it like to live through climate change and geopolitical unrest from the vantage point of the screen, of platform capitalism and algorithms? As NPCs during epoch-making events, how do we make sense of the apophenic experience of scrolling? Narrated by a disarticulate AI egregore, FIRST PHONE plays like a more-than-human stream of consciousness, decentring humans in its imaginary: text operates as image, metaphor as truth, rhetoric as more than adornment, drawing parallels between the indifferent machine and Red Sea hostilities of political and ecological nature. Ruba Al-Sweel is an independent writer and artist focused on media theory and networked communications.
LAS Art Foundation
Berlin · curatorial speaker: Agnessa Schmudke
R&D as Infrastructure
LAS Art Foundation is an arts organisation that examines the present and gives form to future imaginaries. Collaborating with visionary artists, thinkers and institutions worldwide, LAS realises interdisciplinary projects and experiences that explore topics ranging from artificial intelligence, quantum computing and gaming to ecology and biotechnology, illuminating the intersections of art, science and emerging technologies. Since its inception, LAS has sought to redefine what an arts organisation can be: not only a platform for artistic production and learning but also a site for research and development that, through cross-disciplinary collaboration, interrogates systemic crises — ecological, humanitarian and post-extractivist. Their presentation reflects on how such an institutional model can cultivate resilience and experimentation.
eHTC
Experiments in History, Theory, and Criticism
Rogue research unit
eHTC (Experiments in History, Theory, and Criticism) is a rogue unit founded by Carlos A. Segura in 2023 as a pilot program to test practice-based research methods at the School of Architecture, LCI Veritas (Costa Rica), where it initiated the project Cement Landscapes and Unauthorized Biographies on the environments surrounding the cement industry. Alongside Operaciones (Costa Rica) and Truncata Workshop (USA), eHTC developed an experimental residency under Residencias Remotas at UNAB SoA. It has exhibited and published across units of Geophysics, Philosophy and History (University of Costa Rica), Architecture (UNAB and ETSAM) and Art (UNSAM, Argentina), and has joined Autónomas Forenses, the network of Forensic Architecture agencies in Latin America. Unit members include Carlos A. Segura, Javier Peña (working on 3D clay printing for coral reef regeneration) and Luis Alejandro Sánchez Rivera.
Social Sensibility R&D
Bern · Beijing · Paris
R&D departments
Social Sensibility R&D is a distributed set of departments founded and coordinated by Alessandro Rolandi. Alessandro is a multidisciplinary artist and researcher based in Bern after 18 years in Beijing, focused on social intervention and decentralized autonomous practices; exhibited at the Venice Biennale, Gwangju Biennale and Manifesta 12, a Roxbourg Fellow and former co-curator of the Beijing Media Art Biennale. Tianji Zhao is a visual artist and Director of the department in Beijing/Daxing, using found materials and site-specific gestures and formalizing the ‘Work/Live’ intervention methodology. Blandine de La Taille is a Paris-based artist working across printmaking, drawing, video and writing to archive fields of transitional memory, who heads the department in Paris/Gonesse and teaches at Paris 8 University.
Wider collaborators – collaborators on earlier ÉTÈ projects, credited by name: Francesco G. Zucconi (Rome), together with everyone credited in the 2025 ETENS programme at Berlin Science Week.
NEW PARTNERSHIPS FORMING — research, data, legal and institutional partners: partnership@ete.institute (send a proposal and the data you want mapped — free mapping).
◍
Featured & in partnership
Where our work has been shown, and the institutions we work alongside.
Featured · partners · hosts
UN Ocean Decade
⧨
The ingestion instrument — anonymized at the point of collection
Legibility is a governance property: an instrument that lawyers, engineers and diplomats can point at together is doing epistemic work a PDF cannot.
⚙⚙
Ventures — one motherboard, separated engines
The institute is the substrate; OUIM and ISH are the engines — separated as entities, merged at the substrate. The protocol and the registry never enter the commercial entities.
⚙⚙ · engines
OUIM · GROUND · SKY · SPACE ↗
ISH · INTERNATIONAL SKY HUB ✉
Engine 01 · design intelligence
OUIM — one vertical design space
City and infrastructure as a twin that answers. The low-altitude economy, designed before it is flown. The satellite layer as a design input. Design outputs that hold up as evidence — including a concept wearable agent: signals and memory accreted, layer by layer, into infra-intelligence. ouim.space ↗
Engine 02 · compliance system
ISH — sovereign sky zero-carbon compliance
Three layers, one computable governance plane. Three regions — no single jurisdiction dominates. One anchor industrial partner per region, co-founding the standard. Deck on request: partnership@ete.institute.
↓
OUIM — the platform, live
GOVERNANCE — both engines sit on the service-entity track (the "investment" money of the three). Design outputs flow back as Composer import files; the evidence layer stays with the institute, neutral, always.
€
Pilots & partners — the service entity
Compliance happens in documents; violations happen in space. What we sell is the evidence layer: continuous, signed, recomputable by any party. The institute stays neutral — the registry is never for sale. Dual-use means investigative and commercial, never military.
Offer 01 · 3 slots
Official Ingestion Partnership
Your telemetry embedded in the Tier 2 anonymized pipeline, running live on the ÉTÈ Incubator main screen; your protocol becomes the 2027 Bluebook baseline. Tooling sponsorship + technical endorsement. Indicative €15–50k.
Offer 02
Schema Compilation
Your framework — AI Act, DSA, CSDDD/LkSG, GB standards — compiled into executable, verifiable audit geometry. Deliverable: schema + live demo + documentation. Indicative €6–20k per framework.
Offer 03
Certified Forensic Audit
Per-certificate signed evidence reports (law firms, compliance, insurers), or continuous-monitoring subscription pilots. Indicative from €2.5k per report; €3–8k/month pilot.
Offer 05 · robotics · concept stage
AMYGDALA · the edge sentinel unit
An embedded robotics module modeled on the amygdala: fast alerting, spatial recognition, threat-salience judgment — for infrastructure sites and vehicles. Fully encrypted end to end; the unit only stores and decodes signals, never commands — a witness, not a controller. Every signal can land as a signed evidence record. Explicitly not applicable to military deployment. Lab 3 R&D · pilot partners: partnership@ete.institute.
Offer 04 · new
BIM / Twin Compliance Pilot
IFC into the Composer → codes compiled as constraint envelopes → agents audit → signed compliance report. Bilingual EU + GB standards library is a capability no one else holds. Indicative from €10k.
4
laboratories
3
instruments running live
5
revenue lines incl. robotics
11.5–7
Berlin launch
0
price of the registry (ever)
€→
The round — a trust-infrastructure vehicle
Structure
Investment enters the service entity; the commons never does
The service entity holds: Governance-Graph SaaS, schema compilation, certified forensic audits, BIM/twin pilots, and the AMYGDALA robotics line. The protocol and registry stay foundation-held — not a concession, the moat: accumulated signed evidence is a network effect nothing can fork.
Use of funds
18 months: software to revenue, robotics to prototype
① Productize the Governance Graph & Composer (the AI-Act clock is the demand side); ② first AMYGDALA hardware prototype — the encrypted edge witness unit that only stores and decodes signals, by design in the light-touch regulatory class; ③ commercialize the coalition after the Berlin launch.
They can copy software; they cannot copy three things: neutrality (a Big-Four auditing itself convinces no one), the accumulated signed-evidence registry, and the bilingual EU+GB standards library. Witness status is structural, not a feature.
Why now?
AI-Act obligations phase in, DSA enforcement accelerates, CSDDD lands — the compliance budgets are approved and the instruments don't exist yet. The regulatory clock is our market clock.
Is the robotics serious?
Serious, and deliberately conservative: AMYGDALA is an encrypted witness unit with zero command authority — which places it in the fastest-to-certify machine class in Europe. Prototype first, certify second, never military (excluded at the level of our Terms).
BOOK A 20-MINUTE TECHNICAL ALIGNMENT CALL — partnership@ete.institute · live demo: trust engine → breach → signed record → downloaded log (60 seconds). Prices indicative; scoped per jurisdiction.
Live signals raise a governance terrain: eight conflict and governance nodes (strait, Baltic cable, spectrum, DSA…) driven by OONI and GDELT data. Drag to orbit, scroll to zoom, click a node.
G
Governance geometry — a new interface for governance
We make complex organizations understandable. Upload your org chart and AI workflow — receive a visual map of decision paths, accountability gaps and governance risks.
Upload your org chart and AI workflow description; within 30 minutes receive the visual map: who decides what, where the accountability chain breaks, which oversight vacuum your AI systems sit in. The prototype below runs now.
Offer · two weeks
The AI-governance mapping
Map your AI governance in two weeks: interviews + documentation + compilation. Leave with a visual governance architecture and a roadmap for accountability — geometrically ready for the EU AI Act. partnership@ete.institute.
⌁
The prototype — generate your governance graph
Paste an organization description below (roles, committees, AI systems, who reports to whom, who approves what). The text is used only for this analysis.
Ask about accountability
prototype · analysis happens in-session · inputs are not stored · output is not legal advice
Mortality salience is a documented driver of human information behavior: burial, inscription, archiving and transmission operate as loss-mitigation systems. This experiment tests a hypothesis — whether affective content can be preserved in infrastructures that lack affect, and what is lost in the translation.
Method — Corpus: documentary footage of funerals, mourning and burial rites. Index structure: a spatialized necropolis topology (traversable, enterable chambers). Interaction protocol: traverse, focus, step inside. Metadata schema: time, place, rite type per death event. The system is designed to keep operating unattended — not as metaphor but as experimental condition.
RQ 1
Storage ≠ mourning
The act of storing derives from loss aversion and is therefore a human trait; the storage infrastructure itself does not participate in mourning. Distinguishing the two is the experiment's first measurement.
RQ 2
Machine thanatology
Technical systems have their own termination modes: expired credentials, unresolvable links, decommissioned servers, unreadable formats. Operational death can be formally defined and indexed — the experiment places it beside the metadata of biological death.
RQ 3
Limits of translation
A data center preserves traces of death through technical operations — metadata, redundancy, checksums — rather than ritual: preservation without mourning. The core question is thus statable precisely: which properties of mourning can a system ontologically unable to mourn preserve, and which are lost?
Case method — Practices of archival refusal as research object: refusing what has been refused to us; anti-generalisation; working in case series and essays. The series spans successive revolutionary periods: grassroots archives created, appropriated, and reconstructed.
THE BUILD BELOW IS THE ARTIFACT ITSELF, UNSIMPLIFIED. CONTENT NOTE — documentary footage of funerals and mourning rites. CONTROLS — ← → traverse · click to focus · ENTER step inside · WASD walk · ESC leave.
Drafted collectively · Joaquina Salgado (build & index architecture) · Fatemeh Kazemi (archival refusal · case method) · Hadaly Villasclaras (machine thanatology). Cultural Forensics laboratory (Lab 5).
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v1.0 · 2026-07 · applies to www.ete.institute
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The instrument for connecting with partners and customers: targets, sockets, status, next action, copy-ready mail — every yes is ammunition for the next email.
Message generator · N = connection note · D = follow-up DM · ✉ = full email
org-substituted
The loop: in→ find the human · N copy the note, send · once accepted, D copy the DM · use ✉ when it needs to be formal.
V2
The next horizon — evidence-based spatial intelligence
From civic evidence instrument to an autonomous, privacy-preserving Spatial AI Agent — one that doesn't synthesize prose, but reasons through sovereign 3D spatial telemetry.
A 7×24 digital detective: continuously monitors transnational datasets (OONI, OpenSky, IODA) and flags correlation anomalies without human instruction — a localized BGP hijack overlapping unexpected low-altitude airspace restrictions.
R&D 02
Geometric spatial intelligence
Beyond LLMs into spatial computing: line-of-sight propagation, path-loss vectors for radio interference, volumetric cross-border flows — materialized as immutable 3D objects. Attacks are not virtual; they land on cables, base stations, beams.
R&D 03
Privacy-preserving edge auditing
Cryptographic tokenization and zero-knowledge principles at ingestion: audits state-level network threats and physical infrastructure vulnerabilities while mathematically guaranteeing the anonymity of individual citizens inside attack zones.
Algorithmic persistence: a compressed identity that survives the filter of time
Our agents follow the algorithmic agent's triad — a Modeling Engine, a scalar Objective Function, a Planning Engine: model-mediated regulation. Every C2PA manifest is exactly that "compressed identity"; every boundary check is an irreversible act of regulation across a thin, thermodynamically costly boundary (its Landauer cost is the price of trust). By the Algorithmic Regulator Theorem, a regulator shares mutual algorithmic information with what it regulates — an auditor must contain a model of the audited. This is why the evidence must persist with the instrument. (external reference: Ruffini & Castaldo, Zenodo 10.5281/zenodo.21278422, CC-BY 4.0 — not an ÉTÈ publication)
Step one is complete: geometric semantic modelling. Next: giving this geometric world the spatial intelligence to reason and to resist forgery. The technical architecture whitepaper launches on Day 3 of the ÉTÈ Incubator.
06
Audience & impact — worlding field
The world is a landscape. Ten constituencies — position is politics.
01
Civic agency preserved
Orientation indexing prevents collapse into corporate optimization.
02
Participation without exposure
Tokenized anonymization shields vulnerable local actors.
03
Policy translated across regimes
EU data protection against high-surveillance border zones — friction rendered before legislation.
04
Speculation stress-tested
Actionable outputs: the Civic Airspace Charter and empirical briefings.
07
Sovereign Spatial Bluebook — /bluebook
A peer-reviewed, open-source standards report for science diplomacy — assembled in the open, delivered to parliaments.
Now · Jul–Oct 2026
Draft & ingestion
Open repository accepting submissions; the telemetry speaks for itself.
11.5–6 2026
Open review at the Incubator
The working assembly consolidates recommendations.
12.2026
Delivery
To European parliamentary committees and trade bodies.
2027
Validation & scale
Field validation trials; Science Diplomacy Fund deployment.
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