After Utopia: Marco Brambilla on AI, collective dreams, and futuristic imagination

Introduction

At The Wolfsonian–FIU Museum, Marco Brambilla’s installation After Utopia immerses viewers in a lush, digital dreamscape that reimagines humanity’s collective aspirations through artificial intelligence. The work interrogates how technology reshapes our visions of progress, nostalgia, and perfection.

Artistic Concept

Brambilla blends vintage imagery from the World’s Fairs with cutting-edge AI-generated sequences. His approach fuses historical optimism with contemporary anxiety, reflecting society’s fascination with both innovation and the loss of human connection. The installation loops in a continuous digital panorama, inviting contemplation on progress as an endless cycle.

“What interests me,” says Brambilla, “is how technological promises echo our mythologies of paradise and advancement. AI gives us new tools to visualize those old collective dreams.”

Themes of Technology and Myth

In After Utopia, AI serves as both medium and metaphor. The algorithm’s recombination of archival materials mimics the human mind’s process of remembering and reimagining. Brambilla positions this digital dreaming as a mirror of civilization’s quest for transcendence through creation.

Exhibition Details

The immersive video installation can be experienced at The Wolfsonian–FIU, where multi-layered projections and soundscapes envelop the viewer. The piece functions like a moving fresco—part history, part prophecy—offering a meditation on how future fantasies are continuously built from the debris of the past.

Author’s summary: Marco Brambilla’s “After Utopia” merges AI technology and historical imagery to explore how collective dreams of progress keep evolving through digital art.

Hube magazine — 2025-11-26