Terms of Assembly for hybrid public spaces

Natalya is a media digital designer and a researcher of visual arts theories based in Berlin. Her practice consists of the computational processing of imageries, game engine, 3D animations and generative AI with a particular interest in a theoretical approach to video, narrative, and movement. She has a Bachelor of Arts in Art and Visual History, Italian Language and Literature (Humboldt University of Berlin) as well as Philology - German and English language and literature (Vasyl Stefanyk Precarpathian National University) She is currently studying Design and Computation at UdK and TU Berlin.

Otto is a spatial designer, media artists and researcher based in Berlin. In his practice he deals with collective negotiation of spatial resources and social-geographic of gamified militarization. He has a Bachelor of Arts in Interior Architecture (Detmold School of Design) and is currently studying Design and Computation at UdK and TU Berlin as well as Emergent Digital Media (class Hito Steyerl, AdbK Munich)

Lars is a spatial designer and social researcher based in Athens. His practice is focused on empowering users and inhabitants to become designers themselves. He embraces design as an invitation instead of a solution - with a special interest in making public spaces truely public. He graduated with a Master of Arts in Interior Architecture and Spatial Arts from Detmold School of Design last year.

Natalya, Otto and Lars merge their interests with the collective “Terms of Assembly” into a hybrid critical spatial practice.

Terms of Assembly
The boundaries between real and virtual publics have collapsed. Public space is no longer fixed to territory — it fluctuates across screens, platforms, algorithms, comments, and feeds. What emerges is a hybrid public space: a phygital, mixed reality shaped by gamified governance, filtered narratives, and attention economies.
On these platforms, global complexity is flattened into lifestyle advice and catchy feedback loops. Realities are uploaded, replicated, outsourced, and monetized. They are cutified and gamified into digital twins that offer more certainty, validation, and profit than the messy ambiguity of IRL encounters. The power to simplify realities is exported back into IRL, where identity, state and markets are becoming real-time renderings - malleable and manipulatable to fit changing Tiktokified worldviews.
Architecture has never been only a construction of form — it was always an ideological interface, a construction of fact-fictions and a concealment of friction and extraction. Likewise, IRL public space was never a stable counterpart to the digital dynamics. Both operate as overlapping extended realities rooted in selective interests - accelerated by platform logics of privatization and polarization, which are increasingly limit the access to hybrid public spaces.
We explore how these construction methods of hybrid publics — gamification, cutification, filtering, life-styling — are currently used for a technologized revival of populist, neoliberal and patriarchal pasts. And how can the same methods be used to build training grounds for democratic futures? How can they become new urban tools to rewrite the terms of assembly - shifting from control towards collective agency?
What frictions, permissions, and exclusions shape our ability to gather, speak, or belong? Through mapping, prototyping, and storytelling, we aim to surface the architectures of hybrid statecraft — and speculate on new forms of hybrid public assembly.