After Utopia

After Utopia reimagines more than a century of World Expositions — from Paris 1889 to Osaka 2025 — treating their iconic pavilions as time capsules of technological optimism. Brambilla reconstructs eighteen Expos as a single ascending digital city, where iconic structures from Paris, Montreal, Brussels, Osaka, Seville, Shanghai, and New York coexist outside chronology or geography.

 

Drawing on visionary 1970s architecture — especially Archigram’s modular “Plug-in City” and Superstudio’s global “Continuous Monument” — the work merges the pavilion as reconfigurable unit with the grid as world-structure. This hybrid space reflects how utopian ideals have shifted from physical monuments to algorithmic systems.

 

In the installation’s three ultra-high-resolution vertical channels, algorithmically-generated human figures move across the panorama. Their numbers are drawn from historical Expo attendance, populating this synthetic Utopia with traces of real human experience.

 

After Utopia reflects on how our visions of the future have evolved: from grand architectural promises of “better living through technology” to digital systems that may now shape imagination itself.