VizFutures
A speculative design installation invites participants to encounter themselves in 2050. Aged faces, choices and generated city scenarios turn possible futures into a shared experience that can be entered, interpreted and questioned.
The project begins with the distance between looking at an image of the future and feeling personally implicated in it. Repeated AI-generated visions can leave the future abstract, even when the images themselves are vivid.
Speculative design provides a way to make that distance available for reflection. The scenarios are prompts for considering possible conditions and responses. The participant’s own face places a familiar presence inside that uncertainty.
Making the future personal
Developed through a multidisciplinary research group with Art Korea Lab and Modulabs, the work explores how generated imagery might support collective imagination. Research material considers representations of the future and the fatigue that can accompany repeated AI visions.
The design moves toward a personal and performative encounter. Choices, recognisable places and a transformed self give the participant a position within the imagined world.
Encountering a future self
An aged version of the participant’s face provides an intuitive entry into the scenario. Seeing a future self links an otherwise unfamiliar time to a body and identity that the participant recognises.
The face becomes a point of connection between a personal life and wider changes in the city. The installation uses this connection to invite consideration of how one might inhabit and act within those conditions.
2050, your birthday
The scenario begins on the participant’s birthday in 2050, in a chosen city. Landmarks and environmental conditions frame three possible directions: collapse, preservation and transformation.
Choices about movement and responses to the situation shape a generated narrative. These decisions let the participant engage with the conditions of a possible world and the practices that might help them navigate it.
Collapse, preservation, transformation
The generated scenarios place environmental pressure, adaptation and transformation alongside one another. Their visual differences make the consequences of each imagined condition available for discussion.
Generation keeps the scenario open to variation. Images and narratives act as material for interpretation, giving people something concrete through which to ask what they value and how they might respond.
A future experienced together
Generated images and narratives unfold as a changing projection around the audience. Individual decisions enter a spatial encounter, allowing a future to be experienced in relation to others.
The installation makes speculation performative. A participant can see themselves within the scenario while people around them encounter and interpret the same material from different positions.
Possible futures become a shared occasion for asking how we might live, adapt and act. Each encounter adds a personal perspective to that question.
Credits
- Art Impact Lab / lead
- Arrddon (Kiryung Nam)
- Art Impact Lab
- 김명규, 박지수, 안소희, 양숙현, 윤종원, 이동희, 이유빈, 이진호, 정효정, 홍정민, 황남웅
- Video production collaborators
- 김민정, 이하림, 박선진