Firetrucks line the entrance as firefighters race inside past a crowd of confused onlookers. This is not an apocalyptic Los Angeles in flames but the sight that greeted me at ACMI’s The Future & Other Fictions exhibition. It seemed for a hot second that the future had been cancelled, but it turned out to be a false alarm. Ten minutes later, the firefighters gave ACMI the all-clear to reopen its doors.

ACMI’s summer exhibition is co-curated by Amanda Haskard and Chelsey O’Brien in collaboration with Australian director, architect, and futurist Liam Young, who is also a featured artist. The exhibition boasts over 180 works by nineteen visionaries, from movie posters and concept art, to costumes, props, and screen-based artworks. It is structured around three thematic questions: “how do we imagine” through all the behind-the-scenes production design; “what worlds exist” on our screens; and “who will we be” in the future dreamt up by wide-eyed optimists and cynics alike. More broadly, the guiding thread is that our visions of the future are shaped by the stories we see on our screens, especially science fiction stories. These SF futures typically fall into two categories. There are the dystopian futures ruled over by totalitarian governments, power-hungry megacorporations, runaway artificial superintelligences, and post-apocalyptic bands of cannibalistic raiders. Then there are the utopian, or at least more hopeful, futures in which we have learnt to live in peace, harmony, and prosperity. Like a typical Hollywood SF movie, The Future & Other Fictions is structured so that we begin in dystopia before working our way towards a happy ending.

The future means nothing, if it is not new, innovative, and exciting—even if it is also unsettling, alien, and even inhuman. As Mark Fisher explains in Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology, and Lost Futures (2014), what was so futuristic about jungle music and nineties cyberculture more generally was that they “liberated the suppressed libido in the dystopian impulse, releasing and amplifying the jouissance that comes from anticipating the annihilation of all current certainties”: “The paradoxical identification with death, and the equation of death with the inhuman future was more than a cheap nihilist gesture. At a certain point, the unrelieved negativity of the dystopian drive trips over into a perversely utopian gesture, and annihilation becomes the condition of the radically new.” There are times when ACMI’s exhibition drip feeds us a little microdose of the rush of the future. But for the most part it appears that this rush is rather difficult to manufacture today.

It is curious that many of the works on display are either failed attempts of recent SF imaginaries or simply not SF at all. The last time I descended into ACMI’s basement was for the Wonderland (2018) exhibition, which nicely recreated Alice falling down the rabbit hole into wonderland. This time, however, I was greeted by a stark pair of projectors flashing a graphic with the exhibition title in the style of nineties Australian cyberfeminist art collective VNS Matrix. The first rather dimly lit room is tiled with wall-to-wall movie posters. Among the posters for classic SF films like Blade Runner (1982), Akira (1988), and Mad Max (1979), there is also one for the Netflix series Stranger Things (2016-2025). This is a rather odd choice since the series is not set in the future at all. On the contrary, it is perhaps the purest example of a nostalgic reproduction of the past (in this case the eighties), whose greatest cultural impact was probably getting everyone to listen to Kate Bush again. There is also a poster for The Filth and the Fury (2000), a film about The Sex Pistols, whose rallying cry on their 1977 debut album was “No Future.” In After the Future (2011), Franco “Bifo” Berardi argues that this punk mantra portended precisely “the century with no future” to come:

In the last three decades of the century the utopian imagination was slowly overturned, and has been replaced by the dystopian imagination. For many reasons the year 1977 can be seen as a turning point: this was the year when the punk movement exploded, whose cry—‘No Future’—was a self-fulfilling prophecy that has slowly enveloped the world.

Another curious outlier to the exhibition theme comes later with Hannah Brontë’s Birth of Dawn (2024). Commissioned by ACMI, this ten-minute, three-panel video reimagines the sun as a pregnant belly while women dance and sing the new day into being on a planet yet to experience its first dawn. While the sun rising tomorrow is technically the future, it gives us little sense of the future’s adrenaline rush.

This is not to say that everything on display in this exhibition fails to excite. The first video work I encountered is another ACMI commission, Imagine a World (2024). This is an eight-minute montage of clips from seminal dystopian SF films, from Metropolis (1927) and Alphaville (1965) to Ghost in the Shell (1995) and Terminator (1984). Although it paints a picture of a dystopian future, the video is quite playful as the narrator eventually reveals that we haven’t been listening to a human at all but rather an AI generated voiceover. Another ACMI-commissioned video work, RESET: A Journey into Cyberpunk (2024) by Conor Bateman, stitches together clips from cyberpunk classics like Blade Runner, Tron (1982), Hackers (1995), and The Matrix (1999), soundtracked by a nineties jungle beat. It showcases all the classic tropes of the neon future drenched in green matrix acid rain: Totalitarian governments and megacorporations vying for power; increasingly autonomous machines spiraling out of our control; and the last humans left alive scavenging for body mods in gritty, high-tech cities or immersing themselves in virtual worlds. The clips are narrated from our first-person POV as though we have just woken up in the dystopian future and are being informed of the new regime’s rules. Our radar vision is then hacked by rogue agents telling us to escape the simulation. If you sit around for long enough, just after the video seemingly ends, the hackers then playfully ask us why we are not walking away from the screen now that we are free. Through their montages of deterritorialised horizons, these two video essays are among the handful of works here that really give us a sense of future rush. In this respect, the twelve-minute Afrofuturism in Music (2024) melody of footage—from jazz musician Sun Ra’s seminal film Space is the Place (1974) to music videos by the likes of 2Pac and Janelle Monáe—is also worth a watch.

The exhibition’s biggest drawcard is not just movie posters and film clips but props, costumes, and original concept art. The selection is, again, rather curious for an exhibition that is all about holding out hope for a better, brighter future. There is, for instance, some concept art and a prop gadget from the 2023 SF film The Creator about a war between humans and machines after LA is destroyed in a nuclear explosion. But this film significantly underperformed at the box office, with many attributing this to anxieties around ChatGPT and other generative AIs. Why go to the movies to watch runaway AIs when this is the dystopia we are already living? There is also concept art from CD PROJEKT RED’s video game Cyberpunk 2077. While the hype around this game was massive, it was widely criticised upon its release for containing numerous glitches and bugs. The version made for the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One proved to be so unplayable that Sony removed it from sale, stores offered refunds, and CD PROJEKT RED became subject to class action lawsuits for downplaying the severity of the technical problems, leading its stocks to plummet. The miniature slum housing made by special effects giant Wētā Workshop for Blade Runner 2049 (2017) positioned adjacent to this does not exactly brighten the mood much either. Incidentally, this sequel also underperformed at the box office, with some suggesting this was due to its overemphasis on the established fanbase’s nostalgia. The upshot of all these sets, props, and concept art from burst hype bubbles is less “future shock” than future flop.

A more interesting addition to this room is Olalekan Jeyifous’ The Anarchonauts (2015-2019). Part of his Shanty Megastructures project, these digital photos depict survivors in a twenty-second century Lagos, Nigeria, where they have adapted and repurposed the remnants of a collapsed civilisation to create innovative solutions to everyday living. Having not been made by a major Hollywood studio or AAA video game company, it better captures what the big daddy mainframe of cyberpunk William Gibson meant when he wrote, as per the room’s wall text, that “the street finds its own uses for things.”

By the time I got to costume designer Ruth E. Carter’s Black Panther suit—along with other admittedly dazzling costumes from Black Panther: Wakanda Forever (2022)—the prospect of yet another Marvel sequel as a template for the focus-grouped future was the last thing I wanted to see. The real heroes here are the three costumes designed by the fashion activist collective the Pacific Sisters (2017-2023). Inspired by mana wāhine, a Māori concept that refers to powerful women, these are much stranger superhero costumes, woven from both natural and synthetic materials, from teeth and shells to ribbons of shiny black VHS tape.

Just when I thought the future was over, I came to the fittingly titled After the End (2024), a two-work feature created by Liam Young and Natasha Wanganeen. There is a big screen featuring an image of a masked and suited-up figure slowly morphing from a miner into a deep-sea scuba diver and finally an astronaut. On an even bigger screen, an eight-minute film tells the story of Australia from its earliest First Nations communities, through to colonial extraction and pollution, and into a speculative future where fossil fuels are banned, stolen lands reclaimed, and oil rigs repurposed by sea reefs and Indigenous communities. As I sat on a beanbag passively watching After the End, it occurred to me that for a show about the future on screens, there is a surprising lack of futuristic screens. There are certainly plenty of screens of the traditional type that encourage a passive viewing or “readerly” experience. But where are the immersive VR or “writerly” AR screens? To be sure, there is a kid-friendly room where you can “create your poster of the future” using graphic elements arranged on a transparent board and scan it to take it home with you as a souvenir. But it is hard to imagine kids finding all these immobile screens as entertaining as the short-form video content they can get on their tablets and phones. Of course, if the US government can’t beat TikTok, then ACMI isn’t likely to either.

A few notable exceptions notwithstanding, it would seem that the future on offer is mostly just more screens, more Marvel superhero movies, more nineties music and aesthetics—in short, more of the same. The emphasis in Imagine the World on Fritz Lang’s Metropolis as the OG SF dystopian film is a fitting encapsulation of this. The descent into ACMI’s dark basement, where the room narrows into cramped halls and everything off-screen is dimly lit, is not unlike the hopeless workers being sent down the mines in Lang’s film. If the aim was to simulate the experience of being in a dystopian cyberpunk future, then mission accomplished.

One particularly unsettling moment of overstimulation comes less from any future rush than the way that the sounds from one room—displaying Björk’s dress from the music video The Gate—can be intrusively heard in another room screening Imagine a World. This scaffolding of Björk’s eerie refrain—“And I care for you, care for you / I care for you, care for you”—over the melody of dystopian films make her sound like the voice of a totalitarian regime or sinister corporation trying to sell us a future, one all too easily reducible to wall texts, posters, film clips, and a handful of Hollywood costumes and props.