Breaking Open: an emergent reality series
breaking open
the rooms that changed history all ran on one principle: no audience, only participants.
imagine a media theorist, a technologist, a doctor, a psychic, and a poet all pull up a chair to the same table. the point isn’t what they brought with them. the point is the alchemy of what they build together—the exact thing no single one of them could ever make alone.
builders — you have a prototype, a provocation, a half-built thing that needs a room to become real.
enablers — you have a perspective, a skill set, or the question that sends someone else’s project somewhere they didn’t expect. you’ll find your build in the room.
welcome to breaking open — a sunday creative incubator series for people ready to build the next world instead of doom scrolling about this one. part design lab, part hackathon, part collective spellcasting.
the domains
builds live in the metacrisis. here’s some possibilities:
meaning & mental health — what happens when loneliness is an infrastructure failure, not a personal one
attention & sensemaking
care & coordination — regenerative models for the safety net that actually nets
AI & agency
narrative & imagination — solarpunk futures, civic imagination, the stories we build the next world on
you don’t need to know which one is yours yet. the room will show you.
how the day works
11:30 — doors open at caravan of dreams, a family-owned vegan restaurant in the east village. eat. meet. find your people.
12:00 — intro to vibe coding: if you can describe what you want to build, AI can help you build it. Ben and Michelle will explain how we can use this tool in today's sprint.
12:30 — builders pitch. two minutes. say what you’re making and what you need.
your pitch can be half-baked, a nagging question, a passion you don't know what to do with yet. a hunch. a provocation. the room will help you figure out the rest.
1:00 — enablers choose. teams form.
1:15 – 4:00 — build sprint. make the thing until a concept or story or something exists.
2:30 — team blender. step away from your own build. visit another team. ask the question they haven't thought to ask yet. poke at the logic, stretch the edges, offer the angle they're missing — with love.
then bring what got stirred up back to your own table.
4:00 — show & tell. share what emerged.
what to bring
this is fully BYOT — bring your own tools. laptop, sketchbook, ai agents, half-formed napkin ideas, a seed bank, whatever you’ve got. the room is the infrastructure. you are the toolkit.
this is chapter one. the only requirement is that you came to create.
sunday, march 1, 2026
caravan of dreams