The Future and Other Fictions

The exhibition’s core challenge was to turn speculation into experience: to invite visitors to walk through vivid, plausible tomorrows, explore the aspirations and choices that shape them, understand the critical role of imagination in shaping the future and leave knowing they have agency in what comes next. Art Processors worked with ACMI to give form to the exhibition’s thematic structure and choice of artists, collection items and commissions. Critically, the exhibition was about how on-screen worlds are made, rather than a celebration of the finished works, so the challenge was to immerse visitors in the process and meaning of world-making.

The exhibition showcased speculative future visions from cyberpunk cities to rewilded landscapes and solarpunk utopias. The visitor was at the heart of the exhibition, with a thoughtfully choreographed journey that enhanced visitors’ emotional and intellectual connection with the works on display. Art Processors crafted an experience where visitors stepped into stories: not mere spectators, but immersed in a mise-en-scène evoking distinct future worlds. Strongly theatrical: the exhibition used cinematic devices and stagecraft, with contemporary media, to reimagine how stories are told in a museum setting. Transcending linearity, the series of fragmented, interconnected worlds mirrored the unpredictability of futuring itself.

The exhibition redefined expectations of a museum experience. Every design choice was about visitors, inviting them to reflect, interact, and shape visions for the future in small but meaningful ways. Visitors were left with a sense of wonder, empowered by the idea that the futures they’d glimpsed were not just cinematic dreams but collective possibilities within reach. The exhibition cultivated visionary ideas, but also concrete social capital: shared optimism, imaginative leaps, engagement and dialogue. Audience impact was heightened by interactive opportunities, including poster-making, where visitors crafted posters, digitised them into the fabric of the exhibition, then kept them for themselves.

The Future and Other Fictions featured the artwork of 19 creatives plus 180 works, including film, videogames, screen-based art, costumes, film paraphernalia, video essays, textiles, fashion activism and newly commissioned works. Bracketed by a salon hang of posters underscoring the canon of sci-fi as a way into the exhibition, the visitor journey moved through an eclectic curation of featured artists who disrupt the canon and question conventions in their creative work. The middle section was structured by three themes: “How do we imagine?”, “What worlds exist?”, and “Who will we be?” The closing bracket was a film piece by artist-curators Liam Young and Natasha Wangareen on a cinema-scale screen, and the creative works of visitors themselves. The interactive design supported visitor participation in the exhibition’s celebration of creative practice by inviting them to make posters. Visitors’ posters were digitally scanned into the exhibition and featured in its final space as a moving, illuminated digital collage. This visitor experience was hugely successful both in the sheer volume of posters created and the significant dwell time in the poster-making space, as visitors delighted in refining their visions of the future and responding to the ideas all around them