Coding the Canvas: Why the Future of Underground Art Is Open Source
My murals and the cultural infrastructure I build are not separate practices. Both come from the same belief that artists should help shape the systems around their work.
For a long time, the world has tried to put me in a box. If you look at my portfolio, you see the tactile, high-contrast street murals on the walls of Berlin, physical canvases, and creative direction for global brands such as Fendi, MoMA, and Tommy Hilfiger. That is my visual DNA: loud, urban, and deeply rooted in the physical world.
But there is a second canvas I have been building in the dark, and it is made of code.
My art practice and my technical practice belong together
As an independent creator, I have watched underground culture treated as raw material: collected, flattened, and made useful to systems whose owners do not necessarily share the value with the artists who created it. UNESCO’s 2026 report on cultural policy describes widening inequality in digital cultural markets and the concentration of distribution among a small number of platforms. It also includes projections about generative AI and creator revenue in music and audiovisual work. Those forecasts are not observed losses, and they do not describe every art form. They do make one thing clear to me: being visible online is not the same as having control over the systems that distribute creative work.
I could not sit back and watch artists treated as material for somebody else’s product. That is why I founded Countercult, and why I built its network around an open-source technical foundation.
I am not just directing the vision. I have built the product and software, and I continue to work on its data systems. I use iterative engineering and what I call “vibe coding” to make tools that respond to real needs in the cultural world. The work is technical, but the questions underneath it are artistic: who gets to make the system, what does it notice, and who benefits when it works?
Open source gives us a foundation, not a magic shield
Open source matters because it lets people study, use, adapt, and share software under its licence. The Open Source Initiative’s definition describes those freedoms. They are valuable, but an open-source licence is not a licence to reuse every person’s artwork or private information. It does not make public pages impossible to scrape, and it does not automatically decide how creators are credited or paid.
That is why I have to be precise about what the system can do. Countercult separates public discovery from member-only Exchange participation. That boundary helps keep information intended for members out of public pages. It cannot make public information immune to copying. I would rather state that limit clearly than promise a kind of protection no platform can guarantee. We have written more about those boundaries in our note on privacy and public discovery.
The open-source core gives other people a foundation they can inspect and build on. The culture around it still needs consent, context, local judgment, and clear agreements about how knowledge and creative work are used.
Making a route from culture to paid work
Countercult has two connected parts. The open-source Network helps make artists, spaces, and cultural knowledge easier to find. Countercult Studios does paid research, cultural strategy, curation, production, and commissions with clients. Those things can connect commercial work to paid opportunities for artists, but the platform does not automatically route enterprise budgets into an artist’s account. Each project needs an agreed scope, budget, rights, and payment terms.
I want the technical infrastructure and the commercial work to support one another without pretending they are the same thing. The product can make relationships and local knowledge easier to organise. The actual work still needs people who know the culture, make decisions, and get paid for what they contribute.
That is what the open-infrastructure model is for: keeping the software reusable while treating curation, operations, relationships, commissions, and stewardship as work with value.
The muralist is also the systems architect
You cannot decouple the muralist from the systems architect. The street art I paint on a wall in Berlin and the software I build for Countercult come from the same thesis: reclaiming public and digital space for real people, working around gatekeepers, and building more independent creative economies.
The future of culture is not only digital. I want it to be open and built by artists themselves. But open code alone will not redistribute power. Artists need a say in how the systems operate, boundaries around what is shared, and paid work that recognises their contribution.
The repository is part of the work, just as the walls are. I am not finished building either one.
See the cultural infrastructure I am building
Countercult connects a public Network, protected member exchange, paid Studios work, and open-source software.
Sources and further reading
- UNESCO, Re|Shaping Policies for Creativity: We Share, We Act, We Build, 2026.
- UNESCO, “Creators face projected global revenue losses of up to 24% by 2028,” 2026.
- Open Source Initiative, The Open Source Definition.
- Countercult, “Privacy Is Not a Scraper-Proof Promise.”
- Countercult, “Open Cultural Infrastructure Is Economic Infrastructure.”
Edited from Shona Neary’s supplied draft. External sources support the cited context; statements about Countercult describe its current boundaries and direction, not guaranteed outcomes.
Editorial note: AI-assisted editorial article based on Shona Neary’s supplied text, approved by Shona Neary. Claims about scraping protection and automatic budget routing have been narrowed to match current product boundaries.
This piece was informed by Shona Neary’s writing, conversations, and thinking around independent culture, artists, and place.