System Online: the Studio is Open
For the past few months I’ve been taking a beat, writing, reading, tinkering with tools, having conversations with people I admire (thank you for the patience if you are reading!), rewatching all the movies I loved, recording some music, and slowly assembling the vessel I need for the work ahead.
And now it is live, www.under-over-through.co, and the real work begins.
Under Over Through is a micro research, production, and publishing studio, working at the intersection of what stories can reveal and what systems can enable. A well-told story is a laboratory, a controlled environment where you can stress-test how people feel, adapt, and make decisions when the ground shifts around them. A well-designed infrastructure doesn’t just solve a problem; it generates possibilities its creators never imagined.
Small and slow sound anachronistic these days. Many things can be ordered, delivered, generated in anything from seconds to hours, days at worse. Is this also affecting our ability to think through time? To consider that outside the many perpetual loops of nowness (prompt →wait → evaluate || order → inspect → return || capture → share → rewatch) there is newness peeking through the cracks?
Or to appreciate that most of what we consider standard, required, and inescapable didn’t actually exist more than a hundred years ago?
Everything that we consider immutable was once created as solution to a problem and yes, the solutions were imperfect and in many cases biased and unfair, and generated their own set of new problems to solve... but the core point is that they were designed, and the opposite of immutable. We can’t change the laws of physics, but we can change a lot of other things if they don’t solve anymore our problems.
Anyhow, this is what I wrote to myself when I started thinking about this:
When was the last time you felt optimistic about the future?
The systems we rely on were designed for a world that no longer exists. The mental models are stale. The narratives are exhausted. The soft and hard infrastructures are buckling under the weight of climate adaptation, demographic changes, and the rapid diffusion of AI.
Dystopia is easy. We’d rather build than mourn as crises are also openings to radically imagine new ways of being together.
I certainly don’t have the solutions, but I think it would be interesting to look for them together.
Where Under Over Through operates?
When an R&D team has built something powerful but has no language to explain what it changes about the world, we build that language, and the narrative to carry it.
When a technology needs to be tested not in a lab but inside a human story, under pressure, fatigue, love, fear, to see if it survives contact with real life.
When an organization wants to inhabit a possible future through living labs, simulations, or production residencies where participants build, write, and hack together.
When artists and researchers need infrastructure and production support to explore the edges of AI, storytelling, or community co-creation.
When the goal is to teach people to think in systems by actually constructing them, through labs where design is a way of reasoning, not only production.
When you are building something weirdly-shaped and needs a collaborator comfortable with operating systems, privacy architectures, and AI workflows.
What changes here
This Substack is evolving too. The url is changing (go.under-over-through.co) and going forward it becomes the studio’s monthly-ish (I’ll stay slow) update: a mix of signals, observations, and progress notes from whatever I’m working on. I’ll still write the occasional long-form piece (the essays on privacy infrastructures, designing disorder, and AI agents aren’t going anywhere), but the default rhythm will be shorter, and closer to the work as it happens.
A small ask
I’m taking on a small number of collaborations this year alongside the studio’s own research. R&D partnerships where powerful technology needs language and narrative. Advisory and fractional leadership roles for teams building at the intersection of AI, design, and complex systems. Special projects where the work is genuinely unusual.
If something resonates you can book a call directly, or just reply to this email.
And if you know someone who might find this work interesting, I’d be grateful if you forwarded this along.
Marco
