The tech bros creating our ‘enshittified‘ reality seem to have mistaken sci-fi dystopias for inspirational blueprints. Surely no well-adjusted human actually wants a world of cold metallic surfaces, robot wars and a lack of green trees or breathable air? But if we keep imagining the future this way, in thrilling high-res detail (even while supposedly warning against it) we may just bring it into being.
How to imagine different and better futures through our screen culture is the challenge thrown down by The Future & Other Fictions, the latest summer flagship exhibition at Melbourne’s Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI), running until 27 April 2025.
This original exhibition is co-curated by ACMI’s Amanda Haskard (Gunai/Kurnai) and Chelsey O’Brien, in collaboration with Australian-born director, architect and futurist Liam Young, who is also a featured artist in the show.
Read: From Björk to Blade Runner 2049: revisioning the future at ACMI
Housed in ACMI’s basement exhibition space – show your paid ticket and head down the escalator into the dark and noisy rabbit warren – The Future & Other Fictions features the work of 19 creatives and more than 180 works. These include film clips, video essays, production design sketches and models, costumes, movie posters, comic books and screen-based artworks.
There are sections devoted to dystopian visions and cyberpunk rebellions, as well as to Indigenous-inspired alternatives, Afrofuturistic utopias and other diverse and various world-building that melds technology with local or ancient materials and stories.
Some of these artworks, like Queensland-based artist Hannah Brontë’s three-panel video Birth of Dawn (2024) – reimagining the sun as a pregnant belly with women bathing and singing the day into being – circle the idea of ‘future’ quite loosely, but fit within the arena of utopian myth-making. This is, after all, an art exhibition.
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Why do we find apocalyptic visions more potent?
Right at the entrance, visitors encounter the exhibition’s establishing video essay Imagine a World created by ACMI, an eight-minute compilation of dystopian clips from sci-fi and futuristic classics. Including snatches from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) to Alphaville (1965) Blade Runner (1982), Ghost in the Shell (1995) Terminator 2 (1991), Snowpiercer (2013) and many more, the film is narrated by an AI generated voiceover, which echoes the sensationalist narration of some of those early films.
It asks the pertinent question underlying the whole exhibition: ‘Why do we find apocalyptic visions more potent than utopian ones?’
Why do we enjoy seeing cities smashed, our world destroyed? Does it go beyond navigating and rehearsing fears (as we do with horror films), towards something more nihilistic – the desire to flatten the sandcastle and begin again instead of trying to work with what we’ve got?
Cyberpunk: outlaw technologies and resisting the machine
Conor Bateman’s hugely enjoyable Reset: A Journey into Cyberpunk is the exhibition’s next short video essay, stitching together clips from films like Tron, Hackers, The Matrix, Blade Runner and Johnny Mnemonic. Showing recurrent tropes (body modification, ‘jacking in’) and repeated pieces of dialogue (like, “When I was I child I thought as a child…”), the essay shows the ways in which those films of the 1980s and 90s foresaw the Black Mirror surveillance society we’re now facing, along with the outlaw technologies and potential for resistance.
The exhibition also explores the visual design of tabletop roleplayer turned videogame Cyberpunk 2077’s Night City, with its mix of luxury and poverty, skyscrapers, crowds and neon. The juxtaposition of low life and high-tech that we know so well from films like Blade Runner and Bladerunner 2046 – which are also given attention here.
Not just white: what we’ll be wearing in the future
The Future & Other Fictions has a strong focus on costumes and textiles. What we wear in the future (or how we imagine what we will wear in screen productions) seems to matter a lot, which makes sense when you consider fashion as the most visual culmination of technology, culture and art.
The designs here emphatically challenge futuristic clichés of sleek white and silver, or the high-tech functionality of puffy space suits – though in the exhibition’s final spectacular room, the digital artwork After the End, created by curator Liam Young and written by Natasha Wanganeen, we see a giant figure, fully suited-up and masked, slowly morphing from miner to deep sea diver to scuba diver and astronaut.
Meanwhile, the film on the adjacent screen tells the story of Australia from earliest first nations communities, through colonisation, the history of extraction and fossil fuels, into an imagined future where stolen lands are returned and the machinery of extraction is repurposed. (Give yourself time to loll in the beanbags provided, and watch this one at the end.)
Back at the start though, the first piece of clothing we encounter in the maze is the glittery and iridescent costume worn by Icelandic pop star and multimedia auteur Björk in her 2017 music video for ‘The Gate‘.
Both the dress, designed by Alessandro Michele for Gucci, and the headpiece by James Merry, are featured, alongside looped clips from the video itself, directed by Andrew Thomas Huang. Björk is shown transformed into an angelic and empathic alien, melding ideas of the futuristic and technological with the organic and natural. In the flesh (or on the mannequin, actually), the physical dress looks wholly fake and synthetic, gorgeous and gaudy like a Bridal Barbie from the 80s.
Björk’s wailing vocal refrain, “and I care for you, care for you”, is played loudly and on a loop. This is heard somewhat intrusively in those first rooms of the exhibition and I confess I had to put on my headphones at one point to block it out. (For those of us with special needs or processing issues, it’s useful to note there is quiet chill-out space at the other end of the exhibition near the toilets.)
Other striking costumes include three works by the fashion activist collective the Pacific Sisters, celebrating Indigenous identities by creating hybrid superhero costumes out of materials both natural and synthetic, from shells and teeth to ribbons of shiny black VHS tape. These playful yet slightly menacing pieces are inspired by ‘mana wāhine’, a concept from Māori culture in Aotearoa New Zealand that refers to the power, authority and prestige of women.
And speaking of female empowerment, in the section devoted to Afrofuturism there’s a terrific display of queenly and powerful women’s costumes from the Marvel superhero film, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever (2022).
Academy Award-winning costume designer Ruth E Carter’s inspirations roam from Masai warriors to Issey Miyake, Donna Karan and Winnie Mandela. The clothes are displayed on mannequins, with clips from the film playing behind them, a reminder of one of popular culture’s most potent and well-realised challenges to the racist idea that high-tech societies belong to white people who’ve abandoned or subdued ‘nature’.
Anarchonauts: tech-savvy scavengers
Another brilliant section playing on this theme, is the work by Nigerian-born US-based Olalekan Jeyifous, imagining Lagos Nigeria in 2125. The Anarchonauts and Shanty Megastructures includes digital images of ‘tech-savvy scavengers’ and miniature models of the high-rise shanty towns where these ‘anarchonauts’ live as resourceful and resilient people, creating new political, communal and physical structures out of the decay. The realism of the images makes them particularly striking, as if they’d already happened.
Interactive activity
The scope and scale of this exhibition is large – don’t spend too much time in the first rooms, as I did. Towards the last rooms, I loved the playful, meditative interactive activity where visitors are invited to create a piece of poster art using graphic elements arranged on a transparent board, then scanning it in using their ticket. Your poster can later be projected on the wall as you leave, and it’s accessible to print or download. Like the best craft activities, it doesn’t need to make much sense to feel good.
Like most exhibitions at ACMI, this one leaves you with a list of films and shows you’re inspired to check out in your own time. First up on my list is Gareth Edwards’ intriguing-looking ‘retofuturistic’ sci fi film The Creator (2023), with its robot priests and Asian setting presented in concept art here. I’m also keen to look up NEOMAD, an interactive comic and live action series with characters inspired by its young Ngarluma and Yindjibarndi creators in WA’s Pilbara region. And so many more.
The legendary futurist and sci-fi author Arthur C Clarke famously said in a 1964 BBC broadcast that ‘the only thing we can be sure of about the future is that it will be absolutely fantastic’ – unpredictable and unimaginably different to what we know now. But that doesn’t detract from our need to envision hopeful and liberating options, which The Future & Other Fictions gestures towards.
The Future & Other Fictions runs from 28 November 2024 to 27 April 2025 at ACMI, Melbourne.
