Marco Brambilla Imagines the Future in “After Utopia” at The Wolfsonian-FIU

This winter, The Wolfsonian–FIU unveils “Marco Brambilla: After Utopia,” a monumental, AI-driven video installation that compresses more than a century of World’s Fairs into a single, hypnotic ascent through humanity’s evolving visions of progress. On view from December 2, 2025 to March 1, 2026, the work reanimates icon after icon—from the Eiffel Tower and the Atomium to the experimental fantasia of Expo 2025 in Osaka—drawing from The Wolfsonian’s vast archives to reconstruct these sites as living, breathing digital architectures.

For Marco Brambilla, the World’s Fair has always been a portal into collective imagination. His earliest childhood memory of Expo 67 in Montreal, surrounded by Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic dome and futuristic pavilions, became the seed for a lifelong fascination with utopian aspiration. In After Utopia, Marco Brambilla treats each Expo as a time capsule, rebuilt through a blend of archival material, generative AI, and traditional CGI. Inspirations from radical 1970s collectives like Archigram and Superstudio echo throughout the work, framing a world where architecture, technology, and fantasy merge into one fluid terrain.

Both celebration and critique, After Utopia reflects on a profound cultural shift: from futures once embodied in physical structures to those now conceived—and contested—within digital systems.

Marco Brambilla and After Utopia

WHITEWALL: “After Utopia” reimagines more than a century of World’s Fairs, from the Eiffel Tower to Expo 2025 in Osaka. What drew you to these expositions as a lens through which to explore humanity’s shifting visions of progress and the future?

MARCO BRAMBILLA: My first encounter with a World Exposition was as a child, arriving in Montreal from Milan and seeing the remnants of Expo 67 — Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic dome, the many futuristic pavilions, the monorail train; the city felt like a vision of the future. That experience stayed with me. Since then, I’ve visited many former Expo sites — Brussels, Osaka, Seville, Shanghai, New York. These places were once the stages where nations built their utopian aspirations. They embodied a faith in progress, in the idea that technology could perfect society. Each location produced icons of its era — from the Eiffel Tower and the Atomium, monuments to the belief that technology and innovation could redefine how we live. A future built on the promise of “better living through technology.”

In making After Utopia, I treated those structures as “time capsules.” By feeding archival images and data into generative AI, I reconstructed eighteen Expos from 1889 to 2025. Using search algorithms, I identified the most iconic pavilion from each Expo and animated it into a living, dynamic structure. Parallel to this, I became interested in reviving the spirit of the utopian architects of the 1970s, such as Archigram and Superstudio. Archigram’s Plug-in City imagined a megastructure into which life could “plug-in,” a city composed of interchangeable cultural venues Superstudio’s Continuous Monument proposed a seamless grid that blanketed the world, dissolving the line between architecture and landscape.

After Utopia borrows from both: the grid as world (Superstudio) and the pavilion as reconfigurable unit (Archigram). These architects envisioned a world bound by invisible systems — an idea that has gradually become our reality in today’s increasingly digital world. I wanted to explore not only how we once imagined the future, but how our capacity to imagine it is now being shaped by technologies that may take us in unexpected directions.

WW: You employ generative AI to reconstruct and animate these historical pavilions. How do you see artificial intelligence as both a creative collaborator and a conceptual subject in your practice?

MB: I began working on After Utopia around the same time that the first AI image generators appeared. Working with the Wolfsonian Museum’s archives, I assembled a training set that included blueprints, floor plans, exhibition brochures, and photographs. As the work evolved, I experimented with each new generation of AI tools. The challenge became resisting the infinite options the technology offered and shaping them toward a coherent vision. Ultimately, I returned to traditional computer graphics to construct the final composition — to regain a sense of authorship over the image. 

AI is a great tool for research; it expands the field of imagination. But as an artist, I’m more interested in using it as a collaborator rather than allowing it to generate the work entirely. After Utopia is therefore not simply created by AI — in a way it is also about AI, about the shifting thresholds of control and interpretation it introduces into the creative process.

“I wanted to show how our dreams of the future,”

The Future of Digital Art

WW: The work suggests that utopia has migrated from physical space into the digital realm. Do you see this evolution as liberation, illusion, or inevitability?

MB: I think it’s inevitable. Whether we experience it as a renaissance or as a loss of agency depends on your point of view. The concept of self-expression will never change. After Utopia is a very personal work. We’ve entered the future that writers like Alvin Toffler and Jacques Ellul foresaw fifty years ago, and growing up in the 1970s, I feel like I’m living in what once existed only in the pages of science fiction.

After Utopia tries to visualize that shift; In the nineteenth century, utopia was a place you could visit, a pavilion you could walk through. Now you may explore a system of data. My work doesn’t state whether that’s progress or loss — only that the question now belongs to both humans and machines.

WW: The installation unfolds as a monumental vertical canvas populated by algorithmic visitors. How did you conceive the rhythm and scale to evoke both awe and introspection?

MB: The vertical format mirrors the idea of ascent — both architectural and aspirational. The three ultra-high-resolution vertical channels act as an entrance to After Utopia’s electronic city. The center channel presents the complete vertical composition, a continuously looping ascent through eighteen World Expositions, while the side channels reveal close-up details of the shifting pavilions, as though each is subtly distorted by gravity or time.

Within this digital canvas, chronology and geography are deliberately erased, allowing the pavilions of Paris, Osaka, Montreal, Seville, and Shanghai to coexist in one temporal plane. The scene is populated by algorithmically generated human shapes  walking along a grid system framing the architecture. Their numbers and density reflect actual historical visitor attendance at the Expos, so while the environment is synthetic, their numbers is based on archival data.

“The piece isn’t nostalgic, but it is reflective,”

Marco Brambilla

Marco Brambilla Asks, What Happens After Utopia?

WW: Your work engages the question of agency — who, or what, imagines the future. What do you hope viewers take away from After Utopia?

MB: The piece isn’t nostalgic, but it is reflective. I wanted to show how our dreams of the future — once expressed through monumental structures — are now often articulated through virtual systems. We’re living through the same optimism for technology the Expos once celebrated, but if the nineteenth and twentieth centuries promised “better living through technology,” the twenty-first forces us to ask whether humans will have control over what that our life will look like.

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. After Utopia is about that uncertainty. It asks whether the technologies that once promised liberation might now be creating future versions of Utopia autonomously.