This is the Future

In her exhibition This is the future at the Art Gallery of Ontario, eleven works – all video installations but for one – offer a tour through her development, from her earliest single-channel videos to later installations that engage sophisticated techniques and ideas. Montage is Steyerl’s principle strategy: the playful, sometimes dazzling, collisions among pop-culture imagery, dance beats, and eclectic scholarship and phi-losophy belie her dead-serious concerns – domination and exploitation by political and economic powers. The formal and thematic oppositions developed within both individual and paired works signal Steyerl’s embrace of a central feature of contemporary life, contradiction; her investigations into hegemonic realms are always countered by restorative processes of resistance.

Jill Glessing, Ciel variable 115, 2020 · read the full text

Di forte impatto l’installazione ideata per l’ Arsenale, This is the Future, entro la quale ci si addentra – attraverso delle passerelle sopraelevate che richiamano quelle usate durante l’alta marea a Venezia – in un giardino che una donna cerca di preservare, nascondendolo nel futuro, pieno di fiori digitali dalle cromie e forme sensuali. Ma il giardino è, di fatto, perso nel futuro, perché il futuro stesso deve essere ancora scritto. I fiori gemmano, sbocciano, sfioriscono, senza mai esistere davvero, protagonisti di un loop vitale che non troverà mai un reale svolgimento.

trans.The installation conceived for the Arsenale, This is the Future, has great impact: one enters it along raised walkways that recall those used during high water in Venice, into a garden that a woman is trying to preserve by hiding it in the future, full of digital flowers of sensual colours and forms. But the garden is in fact lost in the future, because the future itself has yet to be written. The flowers bud, bloom and fade without ever really existing, protagonists of a vital loop that will never find any real unfolding.

Livia Savorelli, Espoarte, 19 August 2019 · in Italian · read the full text

Ancora più elaborata e complessa è il l’opera collocata da Rugoff nell’Arsenale: l’installazione ‘This is the future’ è un ambiente in cui il visitatore entra percorrendo passerelle articolate e popolate di schermi digitali sui quali alcuni fiori che si muovono in processo di sviluppo continuo. Il percorso poi immette il pubblico in uno spazio simile a quello di un teatro, dove un’Intelligenza Artificiale, sotto forma di computer generatore di immagini e voce, parla del presente e del futuro della nostra civiltà, fra ironia e serietà, fra profezia e gioco. In un percorso ad ostacoli, in cui tutto quelle che viene detto può essere messo costantemente in dubbio dallo spettatore.

trans.Even more elaborate and complex is the work Rugoff placed in the Arsenale: the installation 'This is the future' is an environment the visitor enters along articulated walkways populated with digital screens on which flowers move in a process of continuous development. The route then leads the public into a space resembling a theatre, where an Artificial Intelligence, in the form of an image- and voice-generating computer, speaks of the present and the future of our civilisation, between irony and seriousness, between prophecy and play. An obstacle course, in which everything that is said can be constantly doubted by the spectator.

Glenda Cinquegrana, Forbes Italia, 28 May 2019 · in Italian · read the full text

The installation title, This is the Future/Power Plants, collapses the now and what is yet to come, as is suggested by the literal and visual portrayal of the closest prediction—one located 0.04 seconds in the future—given the video is made entirely of images predicted by the neural network. The video might not be proposing a new conceptual model of temporality per se; however, it considers and brings the future closer to the present, both conceptually and practically.

Geistė Marija Kin Činaitytė, MAST: The Journal of Media Art Study and Theory 6(1), May 2025 · read the full text