MARCO BRAMBILLA STUDIO

In 1964, Peter Cook unveiled Archigram’s Plug-In City, a speculative megastructure that promised perpetual reconfiguration—buildings as software, urbanism as responsive program. Sixty years later, Marco Brambilla returns to this radical proposition, but with a sobering addendum: if utopia was once imagined through steel and glass, its contemporary form manifests only through data and algorithm. After Utopia, Brambilla’s three-channel video installation commissioned by The Wolfsonian-FIU and produced with PHI Studio, excavates 135 years of world expositions—from Paris 1889 to Osaka 2025—to interrogate what remains of our collective capacity to dream beyond the horizon of the given.

The work operates as archaeological compression. Eighteen world’s fairs, each represented by its signature pavilion, collapse into a single vertical panorama where geography and chronology dissolve into simultaneity. The Eiffel Tower shares visual space with the Atomium, the Osaka Expo ’70 pavilions with Dubai 2020’s sustainability theaters. These structures—once monuments to the conviction that technological progress would perfect human existence—now appear as artifacts of a belief system under severe pressure. “They were like time capsules, preserving the spirit of their era,” Brambilla observes. “Every Expo introduced some new technology… Each demonstrated the idea that technology—whether in engineering, electronics, or biotechnology—could improve human life.”

Yet After Utopia refuses nostalgia. Brambilla’s methodology implicates artificial intelligence not merely as production tool but as conceptual engine—a technology that simultaneously expands and constrains the imaginative faculty it serves. The work’s training dataset derived from The Wolfsonian’s archives: blueprints, brochures, photographs, and sculptural documentation spanning materials predating digitization. This archival substrate, fed alongside contemporary metrics—attendance figures, national anthems, search frequency data—into machine learning models, determined which pavilions to foreground. The algorithmically generated figures that populate the installation correspond precisely to historical attendance patterns, transforming statistical abstraction into choreographed presence.

The conceptual architecture draws on the speculative lineages of Archigram and Superstudio, whose visions of modular, interconnected megastructures—Plug-In City, Continuous Monument—haunt Brambilla’s digital terrain. But where those 1960s collectives projected utopia outward into physical space, Brambilla recognizes that contemporary aspiration has migrated inward, toward the virtual. “If you were to imagine a utopia today,” he states, “it would likely exist virtually rather than physically.” The metaverse, that much-hyped realm of “infinite, reconfigurable spaces,” emerges as the degraded heir to the exposition’s promise of better living through technology.

What distinguishes After Utopia from technological demonstration is its embedded critique of technological mediation. Brambilla describes his two-year engagement with AI as a negotiation: “The loss of agency and the negotiation as to what I am willing to give up.” The dialogue between human intention and machine generation extended the production timeline by a full year—time the artist considers essential to the work’s meaning. “AI can enhance our ability to dream, enabling us to conceive ideas larger and more fantastical than what an individual could imagine alone,” Brambilla acknowledges. “At the same time, it introduces an element of unpredictability—a shift in directions we may not fully control.”

This controlled surrender—authorship as managed abdication—positions After Utopia within broader debates about creative agency in the algorithmic age. The work neither celebrates nor condemns its generative tools; instead, it stages the tension as phenomenological experience. Visitors encounter ultra-high-resolution vertical screens rising like illuminated totems, their upward momentum recalling both architectural elevation and spiritual ascent. Within the perpetual loop, Paris, Montreal, Shanghai, and Osaka merge into what Brambilla terms “a kind of theoretical nirvana, a collective intellect”—a phrase that resonates differently depending on whether one reads it as promise or warning.

“As AI becomes an architect of experience itself,” Brambilla cautions, “we risk losing not only control but imagination—the ability to define what kind of world we want to inhabit.” This is the crux of After Utopia: not a meditation on lost futures but an urgent question about futurity itself. The expositions that once declared humanity’s mastery over matter now appear as rehearsals for a condition in which human agency becomes one input among many. The work distills, in Brambilla’s words, “all these time capsules into one hopeful future, just beyond reach, just over the time horizon.” That the horizon perpetually recedes—that utopia remains definitionally out of reach—transforms the installation from document into diagnosis.

Brambilla’s investigation operates within a lineage extending from Guy Debord’s critique of spectacular culture to Jean Baudrillard’s analysis of simulation. Where Debord identified the spectacle as “capital accumulated to the point where it becomes image,” world expositions literalized this accumulation—vast architectural displays designed to make technological progress visible and consumable. Baudrillard’s concept of hyperreality—where simulation precedes and produces the real—finds its material expression in After Utopia‘s synthesis: eighteen expositions collapsed into a single vertical scroll reveal not historical documentation but the production of futurity itself. The expositions never reflected technological reality; they generated the dreams that subsequent development would chase.
The companion installation in the museum’s historic Bridge Tender House, After Utopia: Pavilions and Spirit Lines, extends this investigation into architectural space, placing Brambilla’s digital visions in dialogue with The Wolfsonian’s concurrent exhibition World’s Fairs: Visions of Tomorrow. Work held in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Brambilla’s practice demonstrates sustained engagement with the mechanisms through which spectacular culture shapes collective imagination. Together, these presentations constitute a sustained inquiry into the archaeology of aspiration—and the uncertain terrain that emerges when the architectures of hope submit to the logic of the machine.

Marco Brambilla Studio

World’s Fairs have always been about this idea of better living through technology. I’ve been fascinated by them for decades—visiting decommissioned sites in Shanghai, Seville, Montreal, Brussels, Osaka. Walking through these spaces after the crowds have gone, after the pavilions have emptied, you encounter something strange: the architecture of optimism in a state of suspension. These were time capsules, preserving the spirit of their era.

After Utopia began with a question: What would a World’s Fair look like if it existed only in virtual space? If you were to imagine a utopia today, it would likely exist virtually rather than physically. The metaverse, those “infinite, reconfigurable spaces” we heard so much about—this is where our collective dreaming has migrated. The nineteenth and twentieth centuries promised better living through technology. The twenty-first forces us to ask whether humans will retain control over what our life will look like.

I selected eighteen expositions spanning 135 years, from Paris 1889 to Osaka 2025, and began collaborating with The Wolfsonian-FIU to access their archives—the largest collection of physical blueprints, brochures, floor plans, and sculptures from pre-internet expositions. My team and I compiled imagery and artifacts, building a library that combined this historical material with digital archives, attendance statistics, and national anthems. We trained AI models on this comprehensive dataset, allowing the technology to participate in determining which pavilions to feature and how the architectural elements might behave.

The lines of people moving through the final work are algorithmically generated: they correspond to the actual number of visitors to each pavilion in its year of operation. This migration—people moving from one future to another—interested me because each Expo occupied a specific moment in time, a specific place on earth, yet promised something universal. In the installation, all of them exist simultaneously. Geography and chronology collapse into a single present.

AI became essential to this project, though not in the way people might expect. I used it extensively for research, for sketching, for processing vast amounts of historical information. But the dialogue between myself and the AI was a two-year process. It added a year to the schedule; I could have finished it a year earlier without this collaboration. That additional time was the cost of negotiating with a technology that can enhance our ability to dream—enabling us to conceive ideas larger and more fantastical than what an individual could imagine alone—while introducing an element of unpredictability, a shift in directions we may not fully control.

Growing up, I was inspired by the utopian architects of the 1960s and 1970s—Archigram, Superstudio. Their designs were driven by a concern for better lives, always conceived for realization in the physical world. The Plug-In City imagined mobile cultural hubs that could bring theaters and libraries to the countryside. AI allowed us to animate the buildings in After Utopia according to the movement of people, generating unexpected simulations that made each Expo come alive in ways those architects might have recognized.

The piece doesn’t editorialize. It doesn’t ask whether this is dystopia or utopia. I prefer to present the material without judgment. What I will say is this: as AI becomes an architect of experience itself, we risk losing not only control but imagination—the ability to define what kind of world we want to inhabit. The work distills all these time capsules into one hopeful future, just beyond reach, just over the time horizon. I think utopia is always out of reach. That’s what defines it.

After Utopia represents my attempt to use a technology that has the potential to both inspire and redirect our aspirations—to make a work that addresses how AI is becoming part of our world while asking whether we are still the authors of our collective dreaming or merely passengers in a cycle of autonomous imagination.

Marco Brambilla