June 10, 2025

A half-day forum at MoMA where commerce meets culture. Discover bold ideas and transformative insights from the world’s leading thinkers

MUSEUM OF MODERN ART

Roy and Niuta Titus Theater
11 W 53rd St, New York, NY 10019

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The Future is Yours to Build

Commerce shapes the worlds we inhabit. Every brand, every product, every experience contributes to a larger narrative, weaving together identity, culture, and technology into something far greater than a storefront. At VISIONS Summit, we’ll explore how the most forward-thinking brands are building ecosystems of meaning, myth, and belonging.

BuildersOFWorlds

BrandsASTime Capsules

Myths & DesignINCommerce

FPO

Speakers

Featuring industry-leading technologists, cultural critics, and brand architects

Featured Presentation

Andrew Huang

Andrew Huang is a musician, video creator, and bestselling author who experiments with unique approaches to making music. He's best known for sharing his ideas and processes on YouTube, where he's amassed over 2 million subscribers. His other work includes scoring commercials, designing music software and hardware, and an eclectic discography spanning everything from rock to rap to electronic to classical.

Justin Breton

Justin Breton is the Head of Brand Marketing Innovation at Walmart, focusing on digital & emerging experiences that drive meaningful engagement with the next generation of customers. He’s been recognized by Ad Age as a 40 Under 40 Honoree & Business Insider as a Rising Star of Brand Marketing.

Gianna Valintina

Gianna Valintina, Global Head of Strategic Partnerships at Spatial, brings over 20 years of expertise in shopper marketing and experiential production, having led high-impact campaigns for brands like the NFL, PepsiCo, Audi, and Nike. In her current role, she leads strategy and production for gamified digital experiences for partners like BMW and Hugo Boss, including the first native commerce Walmart UNLIMITED gamified mini-series. Named a Top 50 Voice in XR by Vogue, Valintina channels her expertise to drive 3D and interactive media innovation across commerce and advertising channels.

Elliot Vredenburg

In 2014, Elliot was mistakenly sent an MFA instead of an MA by the California Institute of the Arts, so he decided to continue working in graphic design. For over a decade, he’s worked as a multidisciplinary designer with a wide range of organizations and individuals, creating powerful, concept-driven work. He’s led and contributed to collaborative projects with notable artists, cultural institutions, and global companies, including Adobe, MLB, Netflix, Cadillac, and the Los Angeles 2028 Olympic and Paralympic Games. Sometimes, he writes, too.

Nikita Walia

Nikita is a seasoned New York-based brand strategist, marketer, speaker, and writer. She specializes in using cultural trends, semiotics, and media theory to make sense of the now and build brands for the future. Capable of delivering transformative and innovative work for brands of all sizes, she has built innovation platforms for Fortune 100s and flexed her strategic muscles for early-stage startups. She believes in the power of brand to unlock distinction, growth, and revenue.

Katherine Dee

Katherine Dee is a writer and internet culture analyst whose work explores the evolution of online communities and digital identity. Known for her thoughtful, agenda-free commentary, she has chronicled everything from the politics of Tumblr to the lasting cultural impact of early internet forums. As the voice behind default.blog and author of egirl 001, Katherine blends storytelling with media criticism to help us understand how the internet shapes who we are—and who we’re becoming.

Luca Del Deo

Luca Del Deo is a meditation researcher and educator specializing in the cognitive and phenomenological aspects of meditative practices in America. As the founder of the Meditation Artifacts Initiative, he collaborates with peers from Harvard Divinity School and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health to create cross-cultural learning opportunities for meditation. Luca holds a Master’s of Theological Studies from Harvard Divinity School and graduated Magna Cum Laude from Boston University in Philosophy and Psychology. His work integrates psychology, anthropology, and religious studies insights to advance meditation education.

Erica Chen

Erica Chen is the Head of Strategy at Media Futures Group, Google's bespoke media agency. In her 20+ years in the industry, she helped drive strategic innovation for brands like General Motors, Samsung, Coca-Cola, Hasbro, and The North Face. Erica is a passionate believer in the power of creativity and empathy.

Ben Dietz

Ben Dietz is Founder of Rangelife, a superformat design unit, and Publisher of [SIC] Weekly, a newsletter devoted to pattern recognition in media, marketing, tech, fashion, entertainment and culture-driven trends. He spent the bulk of his career running commercial partnerships at VICE media, where he was co-founder of the agency VIRTUE. He now consults and advises brands, agencies and publishers.

Casey Lewis

Casey Lewis is a youth trends expert who helps brands reach Gen Z and Gen Alpha consumers. In 2021, she founded After School, a consultancy and daily trends newsletter now read by 50,000 people. Prior to starting After School, she was an editor at Teen Vogue, MTV, and New York Magazine.

Daisy Alioto

Daisy Alioto is the co-founder of Dirt Media. Her journalism and nonfiction have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, The Paris Review Daily, The New Republic, and the Los Angeles Review of Books among others.

Dami Lee

Dami Lee is a licensed architect and creator behind a widely followed YouTube channel that revolves around architecture. She uses architecture as a way to reframe how we look at the world, encouraging her audience to think critically about the built environment.

More speakers coming soon...

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Agenda

1:10-1:30 pm

"Five Thousand Years": Only Brands Will Survive

For all our cloud backups and cultural institutions, it may be consumer brands—logos, packaging, and jingles—that offer the most enduring record of human life on Earth. In this keynote, Future Commerce co-founder Phillip Jackson explores provocative examples of humanity's greatest cultural preservers: consumer brands. From Panasonic to Westinghouse, time capsules aren’t just buried underground—they’re printed on soda cans, preserved in landfills, and encoded in marketing archives. What happens when corporations become the keepers of our culture?

When logos outlast languages, what stories will they tell?

Phillip Jackson

Co-Founder and CEO, Future Commerce

2:00-2:20 pm

Branded Cosmologies: Walmart's Spatial Paradigm

While competitors theorize about innovation, Walmart has methodically constructed a new commercial reality through strategic investments in spatial computing, creator economies, and narrative-driven commerce. Their latest initiative, Walmart UNLIMITED, represents more than a technological advancement—it's a fundamental reimagining of how stories and play become the primary vehicles for commercial engagement. In an era where boundaries between digital and physical retail blur, Walmart's bold venture with Spatial is crafting new commercial geographies into networked states.

As these new territories of commerce emerge, we find ourselves at the threshold of a world where shopping transforms from transaction to immersion.

When the map of commerce is redrawn in virtual space, who will navigate the uncharted territories?

Justin Breton

Head of Brand Innovation, Walmart

Gianna Valintina

Global Head, Strategic Partnerships, Spatial

3:25-3:40 pm

New Meaning in Meditation: The Shaping of Worlds and Realities

Meditation is not what you think it is. Practices like tulpamancy, where individuals create and interact with imagined companions, reveal how mental repetition can reshape perception and ontology. This is meditation, too. We may be on the cusp of a major shift in how meditation is understood in the commercial and professional space, as researchers and technologists are learning more about the depth and breadth of meditation practices.

This new era may have meditation enter the world not as a form of stress relief, but as a method for altering the structure of the mind itself.

Luca Del Deo

Founder and CEO, Contempla Meditation

3:40-3:55 pm

Objects and Anime Characters of Our Affection

From Pygmalion's Galatea to Jung's pots and pans to anime waifus, we have always blurred the boundary between animate and inanimate. This talk traces that lineage, from our imaginary friends to anime crushes, AI confidants, and the deep affection we feel for everything from our stuffed animals to our cars. By weaving myth, psychology, and technology together, animism is manifesting in contemporary life, making seemingly imaginary relationships feel every bit as real—and consequential—as flesh and blood.

Katherine Dee

Internet Culture Analyst, Reporter, and Ethnographer

3:55-4:15 pm

Cartographies of Meaning: Semiotics and Systems Thinking in Design

What if branding isn’t the act of creating a world, but of making it navigable? Commerce leaves behind more than artifacts—it scripts the myths, metaphors, and memories of culture. In an age of accelerated meaning-making and cultural co-authorship, what does it mean to build a brand? Strategy Director Nikita Walia and Creative Director Elliot Vredenburg reframe branding as mapmaking—not as representation, but as a generative act.

Brands, they argue, are not static identities but evolving terrains: ecologies of meaning shaped in motion through friction, flux, and feedback. Drawing from systems thinking, semiotics, and design practice, they explore how strategy and design work together not to define a world, but to render it navigable. The result is not a blueprint, but a compass. Not an answer, but a wayfinding logic for navigating—and shaping—the commercial and cultural landscapes brands inhabit.

Nikita Walia

Strategy Director and Writer, U.N.N.A.M.E.D.

Elliot Vredenburg

Creative Director, U.N.N.A.M.E.D

4:30-5:00 pm

Content, Communities, and the Future of Publishing

We live in a time where everyone is a content creator and legacy publishers continue to see their long and slow decline. With the democratization of media comes a lot of noise, but there are new players entering content feeds that are carving distinct spaces for themselves and their communities.

The future of media is being built today by independent proprietors who are crafting superformat ecosystems that reflect their own distinct areas of expertise and points of view.  And these ecosystems have plenty of room to grow.

A panel of media moguls will share how they’re turning the art and science of media into a unique act of worldbuilding; one that combines the power of community and curation to create new value for audiences. They’ll discuss what’s working, what’s not, and what’s next in the next era of media.

Ben Dietz

Founder, Rangelife and Publisher, [SIC] Weekly

Casey Lewis

Youth Trends Expert and Founder, After School

Daisy Alioto

Co-Founder, Dirt Media

Erica Chen

Head of Strategy, Media Futures Group

5:05-5:50 pm

Spacetime: Identity, Myth-Making, and New Constellations of Worldbuilding

Andrew Huang isn’t just a YouTube creator. He embodies what it means to be a worldbuilder in the modern age, mastering fictional, brand, and mimetic storytelling. His most seminal feat, Spacetime, broke new creative grounds for him personally while also revealing new, unavoidable truths about how we connect and build relationships with those we interact with through the internet. During a presentation and fireside chat with Future Commerce’s Phillip Jackson, Andrew will walk through the layered creative process of Spacetime, and how the project’s ripple effects relate to the way brands build myths, and worlds, online.


How does digital storytelling influence the way we present ourselves in the physical world?

When does our “virtual identity” dictate, even override, who we actually are?

To conclude a memorable day at the MoMA, Andrew will offer his thoughts on the creator economy, the impact of disinformation, and the growing influence of commerce in storytelling. He also will treat attendees to a special musical performance.

Andrew Huang

Author, Musician, and Creator
Summit Is Unmissable • Why VISIONS
Summit Is Unmissable • Why VISIONS
Summit Is Unmissable • Why VISIONS
Summit Is Unmissable • Why VISIONS
Summit Is Unmissable • Why VISIONS

VISIONS brings eCommerce and marketing professionals together to explore the intersection of commerce, culture, and creativity

200 Seats

One Day

Limitless Inspiration

Get exclusive first looks at Future Commerce’s new ‘big ideas,’ the Future Commerce Word of Mouth Index, and curated art experiences

SUPPORTED BY

An Exclusive Future Commerce⁺ Experience at MoMA

Before VISIONS begins, a small group of FC⁺ members will gather for a private experience inside Turning Points in Design, MoMA’s exhibit exploring how everyday objects become cultural milestones.

It’s quiet. Curated. Limited to 10 guests.

Available by invitation to Future Commerce⁺ members only.

What Past Attendees are Saying

“Made me think and gave me a different perspective from which to see the world.”

“The majority of talks do not include any sales pitch. The presentations and speakers are thought-provoking, often leaving you with more questions than answers.”

“Timely discussions with well curated thought leaders.”