Everyone Else Made Souvenirs. We Made the Receipt.
The brief at Vancouver Made was simple. What if Vancouver had its own World Cup kit.
Everyone else made a souvenir. We made the receipt.
The project is called MADE ON, and it took double silver at the event: second in the technical hackathon and second in the fashion design challenge, both at the BCIT Tech Collider on June 20. You can walk through the whole thing here: vancouver-made.vercel.app.
This is what we built, and why I built it this way.
What MADE ON is
MADE ON is a protest collection for the 2026 World Cup. Not kits that celebrate the tournament. Kits that name what it is built on, with every factual claim cited on the hem so you can check our math.
Made on stolen ground. Made on Hogan’s Alley. Made on 729 million dollars of public money.
I took the tournament’s own visual language, the kits, the crests, the sponsor bars, the kit-maker spec type, and I kept the surface and inverted the payload. It looks like official merch from ten feet away. Up close it is the coloniser’s own paperwork. The receipt. The redaction. The banknote.
Five clubs, five arguments
Each kit is its own immersive page, with the concept, the kit up close, the process, and the receipts behind it.
- Nardwuar FC is the red Vancouver-tartan home kit. Research as the protest, the receipt as the weapon. This is the one that won, and the one Formmé is manufacturing five of.
- Pump and Dump FC is the mega-event as a pump and dump. Hype the city, bill the public, take the exit. You are the bagholder.
- Number Five Orange is about work. The labour the spectacle gets built on.
- China Creek is public land, defended, then sold.
- Hogan’s Alley FC is the memorial kit, and the only one that ends in the future tense. The Black neighbourhood the city paved over for the viaduct, and the land trust bringing the block home.
How it works: the Receipts Engine
The build behind it is a thing I call the Receipts Engine. The method is three words: mimic, invert, cite.
You take one civic number, say the public cost of the tournament, and you render it three ways. As a detail on the hem. As a poster. As an editorial line. One fact, three surfaces, all pointing back to the source. The engine is what turns a claim into a garment without losing the citation.
There is also a generative wall of every frame we made, and a making-of for each kit, from prompt to mood to marks to flats to the kit on the body. The whole pipeline is live at the engine.
It took double silver
Second in both tracks, out of a strong field in each.
The dev track, the Devin Open Hackathon, recognized the Receipts Engine and the three live counter-spectacle surfaces. The design track, the Formmé Fashion Design challenge, recognized the Nardwuar FC kit. The design prize is real and physical. Formmé is producing five of the jerseys.
I spent the build fixing what broke, surviving a site-wide redesign, and it still placed twice.
Why I made the receipt instead of the souvenir
I am a settler artist working on the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh Nations. When somebody asks me to make a celebration jersey for a tournament that lands on stolen ground, the honest answer is no.
But no is not a project. So I made the refusal into the work. No borrowed sacred imagery. No turning a culture into a costume. The only thing I let myself dress up in was the coloniser’s own paperwork, because that is the part I am actually allowed to wear.
AI was the brush, not the artist. The subject is greed, displacement, and who pays the public bill. They asked for the Vancouver story. We finished the sentence.
Go see it
The whole collection is live: five immersive kit worlds, the receipts, the process. vancouver-made.vercel.app. Start with Hogan’s Alley if you only have time for one.
Whose cup is it anyway?
If you want the rest of what I have been making with creative AI, where the human stays in charge:
Thanks to Devin by Cognition and Formmé for the tracks, BCIT Tech Collider for the room, and the Young Guns Studio and Students@AI crews for putting it on.
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