Marco Brambilla: After Utopia at The Wolfsonian–FIU in miami beach

December 2, 2025

After Utopia is a large-scale digital installation by Marco Brambilla that reconstructs the architectural mythology of the World’s Fairs. Spanning more than 130 years—from Paris 1889 to Osaka 2025—the work revisits Expos that once served as global stages for technological optimism and speculative design. Brambilla isolates the most emblematic pavilions from eighteen different fairs and recomposes them into a single, continuous environment: part historical archive, part simulated city, and part imagined future. 

Presented as a monumental vertical triptych, the installation unfolds across three ultra-high-resolution channels. Architectural fragments drift and reconfigure within a luminous gridded framework that recalls the speculative proposals of Archigram and Superstudio. Algorithmically generated visitors inhabit the scene, their density determined by attendance figures drawn from each fair. This data-driven choreography anchors the synthetic environment in collective human experience, even as the space itself remains entirely constructed. 

Brambilla draws on contemporary image making technologies—including generative AI—to assemble an evolving portrait of utopian projection. Historically, World’s Fairs offered a physical encounter with visions of the future, inviting viewers to walk through monumental structures that promised new forms of life shaped by innovation. After Utopia revisits these ambitions at a moment when our sense of the future is increasingly mediated by algorithmic systems, digital tools, and automated forms of prediction. 

Rather than offering a single narrative, the installation stages a dynamic collision between past and present: the optimism of the Expos, the shifting aesthetics of technological fantasy, and the contemporary reality in which computational tools actively participate in generating the futures they depict. The result is a densely layered meditation on authorship, progress, and the evolving relationship between human imagination and machine vision. 

After Utopia extends Brambilla’s ongoing examination of spectacle, cultural memory, and the architectures of visual culture. The project reflects his broader interest in how images circulate, accumulate, and shape a collective understanding of possibility.

Marco Brambilla—After Utopia
December 2, 2025 – March 1, 2026
The Wolfsonian, Miami Beach
www.wolfsonian.org