Other Colours was conceived in response to the Vancouver Heritage Foundation’s True Colours, a program that offers grants to incentivize homeowners to restore heritage homes to their ‘true’ Victorian, Edwardian and War Time era (1880–1930) colours, with paint swatches such as “Oxford Bluff” and “Edwardian Pewter”. Canada’s colonial history is a violent history that must be questioned, not ceremoniously replicated. The True Colours program has been deployed largely in support of the gentrification of inner city neighbourhoods, particularly those with a history of immigrant struggle where homes were painted colours that represented diverse cultural backgrounds and experiences of the city. 221A led a Research Initiative with 10 contributors who were asked to provide a swatch for an “Other Colours palette” that would offer alternatives to the True Colours program based on the contributors’ lived experience, cultural traditions and artistic practices. Each Other Colours palette selection is detailed by the contributor with an original text or artwork. This collection of short prose, poetry and social history, printed by Brick Press as an Artist’s Book, offers a more pluralistic account of the city’s built environment and identity.

A three-year digital strategy initiative by 221A that researches, develops sectoral capacity, and implements blockchain technology for cultural, social and ecological use-cases. Blockchain technology will be the next layer of the internet, connecting data and information to new forms of mutually-agreed value. Seen as a new institutional technology, the blockchain could potentially be as crucial as electricity and the internet itself. The programming is based on distributed ledger cryptography, never stored in one central reserve, but replicated and simultaneously updated across networks of server nodes. These distributed systems provide transparency as well as security for transactions and value recognition on the peer-to-peer scale, without mediating authority from third-party and legacy institutions.

221A is developing a plan for an independent Vancouver Cultural Land Trust (VCLT).  The VCLT is conceptualized as an independent charitable non-profit organization that creates a collective response to escalating real estate prices that have placed severe pressure on security of tenure for artists and arts organizations.