Soft Power
AR Recreation of Destroyed Memorials in a Digital Third Space
"This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal." ~Toni Morrison
About
In March of 2025, we — Corrina Espinosa and Molly Valentine Dierks, two designer-artists who met at the University of Colorado, Boulder — were shaken to learn the Trump administration was in the process of destroying public monuments that celebrated inclusion and diversity.
In response, and in the spirit of creative defiance, we began discussing how we could use design in virtual space to resurrect those same monuments.
The first of these was the BLACK LIVES MATTER PLAZA — a beautiful street mural with letters 35 feet high and two blocks long in the political heart of Washington, DC, commissioned by Mayor Bowser in 2020 to acknowledge people "craving to be heard and to be seen and to have their humanity recognized."
Five years later, it was destroyed as part of a white nationalist agenda. The scraped, empty blacktop left us disheartened — and determined to act.
We created Soft Power to digitally revive, in altered form, two chosen monuments through augmented reality: the BLACK LIVES MATTER street mural in DC, and the Orlando, Florida rainbow crosswalk, created in memoriam to the forty-nine people killed at the LGBTQIA+ Pulse nightclub shooting in 2016.
Manifesto
"Soft Power only addresses the erasure of certain monuments — those with social and political significance that champion inclusion, acceptance and diversity over exclusion, oppression, racism or nationalism."
Contrary to hard and sharp power — using military and economic force to dominate, or aggressive policies that disempower and manipulate — Soft Power is the power of inclusion, celebration, and true democracy. It is the power created by freedom of speech and a rich landscape of cultural expression.
This project is hosted on Denver Digital Land Grab, a DIY digital platform co-founded by Corrina Espinosa in 2022 specifically for artists to reclaim space — digitally, when physical space is gentrified, lost, stolen, or otherwise unavailable. There are no laws that govern virtual space. The platform intentionally bypasses corporate entities — the app store cannot simply remove it, and Trump's cronies cannot pressure wash it away.
"We hope not to REPLACE these monuments, but to reference them — to cultivate similar feelings of hope, togetherness, and strength."
With Soft Power, access is an invitation, a choice. Having removed the public's choice to engage with the BLM and Pulse monuments, the administration sought to remove both agency and voice. Soft Power replaces design for exclusion with design for inclusion — joining other artistic acts of solidarity and defiance to revive choice, voice, and creative occupation of public spaces.
Experience the Project
Soft Power is a site-specific virtual installation. You must be physically present at the location — then open your phone camera and scan the QR code to activate the AR experience.
Black Lives Matter Plaza
A reimagining of the destroyed BLM street mural — large block letters hovering in AR before the nation's Capitol.
📲 Share this QR code! Print it, sticker it, post it near the Black Lives Matter Plaza — 16th Street NW, just two blocks north of the White House. The more people who scan it, the louder this memorial speaks.💛
Washington, DC 20006
Pulse Memorial
A joyful animated AR memorial — rainbow cubes and floating orbs honoring the forty-nine lives lost at Pulse nightclub.
📲 Share this QR code! Print it, sticker it, post it near the Pulse Nightclub Memorial — on South Orange Avenue in Orlando, just south of downtown. Help keep this memorial alive for everyone who needs to find it. 🌈
Orlando, FL 32806
Creators
Corrina Espinosa
New Media Artist · Assistant Teaching Professor, CU Boulder
Corrina Espinosa is a Denver-based new media artist and curator working at the intersection of art and technology. She builds custom circuits, kinetic sculptures, and glitch-based works, and has established herself as an augmented reality artist with dozens of works including large-scale, city-wide AR exhibitions. She is currently exploring artificial intelligence as a new artistic medium.
Her work engages speculative research into simulation, examining how constructed realities shape cultural perception and behavior — exploring the surreal and absurd performance of normalcy during moments of social and environmental collapse.
Corrina has organized art exhibitions in Denver for more than a decade with a focus on diversity, community, and inclusivity. Her work has been exhibited locally at the Denver Art Museum, Meow Wolf, and BMoCA; nationally in California, New Mexico, and Pennsylvania; and internationally in South Korea, Barcelona, Bosnia, and Rome.
Molly Valentine Dierks
Artist-Designer · University of Colorado, Boulder
Through immersive installations that draw equally from nature and technology, Molly Valentine Dierks explores evolving landscapes of intimacy, distance, and connection.
Dierks has participated in exhibitions nationally (Dallas, Detroit, LA) and internationally (Russia, South Korea), including with the University of Michigan Museum of Modern Art, Kunsthalle Detroit, and 500X Gallery in Dallas. Select pieces have been featured in Post Industrial Complex, CICA Museum's Art Yellow Book, Designboom, The Jealous Curator, and more.
As a public artist and designer with installations in Detroit, Minnesota, Dallas-Fort Worth, Denver, Sweden, and South Korea, she utilizes the material vocabulary of signs, mass-production, and construction to find ways of 'being' within systems of labor. Through grant support, Dierks has participated in residencies internationally in Finland, Japan, Iceland, China, and Korea.