UNSTOPPABLE VOICES, Art, Data & Code Against Censorship — Web3 Summit Berlin 2026

"One of the highlights of day two at Web3 Summit was Unstoppable Voices: Art, Journalism and Web3 Against Censorship. Through an immersive experience by Andy Serra and the presentation of Firefly Network, participants experienced how art and technology can come together to imagine more resilient and community-driven models for journalism." — Polkadot Blockchain Academy, June 2026

A two-hour workshop. Three moments. All guided by Carlos A. Aguiló S. The first experience: Luz Mely Reyes took the floor and gave a snapshot of independent journalisms in Latin America. Then it was my turn to reset the room: a 15-minute immersive video that had to bridge languages, transcend cultures and connect audiences. After this reset, Shawn Coe showed the demo of the open-sourced app he created as a contribution from Parity Technologies, showcasing that ideas can become concepts.

The Open Source Score: Music comes first. After I hear it, images and ideas come to life.

Everything starts with the jungle — the actual habitat of the cocuyo, the bioluminescent beetle that gives the Firefly Network its name and its origin story. Amazonian soundscape recordings: the real acoustic texture of where this begins.

Those sounds were processed and transformed using SoundThread, an interface for The Composers Desktop Project (CDP) — a suite of spectral and granular transformation tools. The jungle doesn't disappear. It shifts.

16mm film extract shot in South America

The transformed field became the base. On top of it: Sonic Pi by Sam Aaron, an open source live coding music app that is both production ready and friendly. There we were running a Yu-Wang chaotic attractor to drive the drone and the sub-earth non-repeating base pulse, alongside many other buffers doing algorithmic music that was live-routed to another open-sourced node-based synth called BespokeSynth. On top of that, Tape Fiasco (by Jonas Eriksson), a free and fresh plugin that combines distinct real-time time-based and granular effects.

The Data

Independent investigative journalism outlets across Latin America. Basic traffic data captured via SimilarWeb: monthly visits, geographic distribution, platform dependencies. Six of the nineteen operate under active state suppression. Their numbers are undercounts. Traffic via VPN and Tor doesn't show up in any standard metric. The gap between what the data shows and what is actually happening is itself a data point. This is a beginning and does not include data from other platforms.

For the Blockchain data flow:

Substrate API → JSON parachain → Python / NetworkX → TouchDesigner

L-system parameters

To generate the counterpart visuals I opted for a recursive L-system with 90-degree turns, 8 generations, built as a modified 3D Hilbert Curve. The resulting structure is arborescent — branching, traceable to a single root, center-operated. Every node visible from the top. Panoptic by design.

Inicial condition FFA
Angle 90
context_ignore: F+-
A=&&!" [///+FB] [\\\-&FB] [/&^FB]
B=&&&!|" [/FA] [V\V\-FA] [^^FA]

I wanted to quote literature figures from Latin America that have influenced generations. Three writers: Rómulo Gallegos (Venezuela, 1935), Miguel Ángel Asturias (Guatemala, 1946), Alejo Carpentier (Cuba, 1952). Intellectual beacons of their time — not only as novelists but as journalists who also faced exile, censorship, state repression, and responded writing for posterity. What they smelled, we are living in the most dystopian form possible.

"Ahora la infraestructura para resistir, distribuir y subsistir se está construyendo en nuestro idioma, en nuestro continente, diseñada por las personas que más la necesitan."