Artist and film director Marco Brambilla on AI and utopia

The world’s most compelling art offers escape from reality while critiquing it simultaneously, and Italian-born Canadian artist and film director Marco Brambilla has mastered this balance since the 1990s. From Kanye West’s Power music video to his 2008 work Civilization (Megaplex), which depicts an endless journey from hell to heaven, Brambilla’s works immerse viewers in surreal spectacle. In 2008, Civilization (Megaplex) was installed at the Standard Hotel in New York, which was followed by an exclusive screening of its sequel at The Standard Spa, Miami Beach. That marked the first of many endeavours in the luxury industry. Brambilla produced the mesmerizing video art Crystal Observatory in 2019 to welcome visitors into Watches of Switzerland at Hudson Yards, created an in-store installation for Maison Margiela in 2021, and most recently partnered with Golden Goose at Art Basel Miami in December 2024. Unlike many in his field, Brambilla has embraced artificial intelligence (AI) as a creative tool. His latest work, Marco Brambilla: After Utopia, revisits 135 years of world fairs — from Paris 1889 to Osaka 2025 — through a monumental, three-channel video installation driven by AI. The exhibition runs from December 2, 2025, through March 1, 2026, at The Wolfsonian-FIU in Miami Beach. In this Jing Masterminds interview, Brambilla discusses the exhibition, AI’s role in art, and the evolving concept of utopia. Jing Daily: We’re living in a moment of AI-driven fantasy, digital escapism, and polarized futures. How does ‘After Utopia’ respond to this? Marco Brambilla: The work reflects that instability. It doesn’t offer escape or resolution. After Utopia visualizes how competing futures could coexist inside the same systems — how states of optimism, anxiety, and speculation often overlap within the same technological environments. JD: ‘After Utopia’ suggests a world that comes after idealism. What sparked your interest in exploring world expos? MB: My interest goes back to childhood when I visited Expo 1967 in Montreal and Expo 1970 in Osaka. Much later, I visited former Expo sites around the world and started thinking about them as time capsules or some kind of archeology of a future that would never come to be. After Utopia grew out of revisiting those “utopian” visions from the time we occupy now. JD: What does utopia mean to you in the context of contemporary culture and digital media? MB: Architectural Utopian experiments like those of Superstudio and Archigram aspired to be physical environments. Now that condition, or way of thinking has largely migrated to construct a virtual world. In digital culture, utopia has shifted from a physical place to an abstract structure shaped by algorithms, data, and networks. That shift is what I tried to express in the work. JD: How did you select which expositions to include? MB: I focused on expos that marked turning points in how technology was imagined: moments when architecture, design, and ideology were dominant. I also used the results from search algorithms to identify the most emblematic pavilion(s) from each Expo. The selection spans from 1889 to present-day (Osaka 2025) presenting a long view of how the same ideas keep resurfacing in different forms. JD: Was there a historical moment, artwork, or personal experience that informed the conceptual backbone of this show? MB: My inspiration came from the radical architecture movements of the 1960s and 1970s: Archigram, Superstudio, and others. And with my early exposure and research concerning world expos. Those architects believed architecture could reorganize society, and that belief feels similar to how digital systems are imagined today. JD: Did this show involve any new technical processes, or technologies you haven’t used before? MB: Yes, particularly in how I used generative AI as a research and transformation tool rather than a final image generator. The workflow evolved constantly over the two year production period. I was moving between AI-generated animations and traditional CG, which changed how I made certain aesthetic decisions during the process. JD: How do you navigate the boundary between digital overload and visual clarity when constructing these immersive tableaux? MB: That boundary has become critical with AI. The technology produces complexity instantly, so the strict “curation” of AI outputs becomes essential. I’m less interested in showing all the experiments than in distilling the visual language so that the viewer can remain oriented within the virtual landscape. I think even the casual viewer can somehow “feel” when AI is used to create a visual. JD: What emotional or philosophical state are you trying to capture with ‘After Utopia’? MB: I think the work is reflective rather than nostalgic. The work looks back, but not subjectively or with a longing for the past. It’s more about uncertainty about what it means to imagine futures in a moment when technology and in turn our future may no longer be entirely under human control. JD: Do you think contemporary society still believes in the possibility of utopia? MB: I think belief has become fragmented. Instead of shared utopian visions, we have multiple, often conflicting projections of the future. JD: How do you see technology shaping your practice in the next few years? MB: Technology has helped my practice since the late 1990s and the technologies now available will greatly amplify what I can achieve with a relatively small team. JD: Where is the show going next? MB: After Utopia will be shown at the opening of the new Phi Center in Montreal where the project was born. It will also make a few stops along the way in countries that have hosted world expositions in the past. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and brevity. Jing Daily presents Jing Masterminds — a regular, exclusive interview series profiling today’s most iconic names in art, fashion, commerce and culture. Delving deep into their personal journeys, creative processes, business strategies and societal impacts, the series offers readers an intimate look at the lives and minds shaping our industries.

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Artist and film director Marco Brambilla on AI and utopia