Brave New Future

Science Gallery Monterrey at Tecnológico de Monterrey is inviting artists, researchers, community activists and critical thinkers, to submit proposals for existing artistic and research projects to be part of their 2024 inaugural show “Brave New Future,” which will open in September 2024.

Science Gallery Monterrey is a space where artistic and scientific modes of thinking are brought into a collision course to unbalance and stimulate each other, push the boundaries of knowledge and generate unexpected ideas that offer new perspectives and solutions to current challenges. 

Of all the challenges we face today, perhaps the most pressing is what the future will look like for all of us in the coming years. At a time when the future appears to be a sobering extension of our present, Science Gallery Monterrey asks whether we can still gather the courage to embark on an expedition into better, brighter worlds. Do we still have the determination to imagine a brave new future? 

What is the future, anyway, and who gets to imagine it?

Recent developments in AI engines make us wonder whether we should trust AIs to take over planning and deciding what is best for humanity, in what may be a preview of either a perfectly planned society or a dystopian state.

We can also wonder whether it is the time to reclaim the possibility of future bright worlds that emerge from the power of the imagination, unexpected visions made possible by the playful interaction of intuition and reason. Or whether, invoking the trajectory of avant-garde experimentalists, especially that of the Futurists, artists can embrace new technologies and AIs to visualize new worlds of hope and promise.

Brave New Future is an exhibition that presents different visions of what comes tomorrow, an expedition into different futures foreseeing unknown environments of bright, wonderful societies or of catastrophic singularities, all presented from different perspectives and forms of imaging and imagining.

1.1 Potential subthemes

• Science fiction or science facts about the future

• Designing for the future

• Education for the future and the future of education

• Eternal recurrence

• The avant-gardes: Futurism and other movements 

• Philosophies of the future

• The post-Anthropocene 

• Imagination versus algorithm: opposition or complementarity 

• Artificial intelligence: apocalyptic or integrational