Cyborgs, AI, and the Simulation of the Future: What Do We Do with the Dystopia Once We Already Inhabit It?

In a present where artificial intelligence unfolds like an oracle and hyperconnectivity governs us, The Shape of the Future confronts us with a paradox: the technology we envisioned to emancipate ourselves has learned to dispense with us. The immersive exhibition by the collective Ouroboros, derived from the works of Ángeles Ceruti that are part of The Fable of Reason and Other Possible Realities, introduces us to a narrative where Ángeles Ceruti's drawings come to life and transform into autonomous entities, post-organic hybrids that have understood that humans are no longer necessary.

The room functions as a sensory device that immerses us in the threshold of the posthuman: projections surround us, light disorients us, and music pulses in the space as if we were part of an assembly process where the biological and the synthetic blur until they become indistinguishable. It is not an abstract or distant future but an amplified echo of what we already are. In this sense, Philip Auslander’s concept of Liveness becomes crucial: in an installation that reconfigures the tangible through digital mediation, the idea of 'presence' is put into crisis. Are we witnessing a live artwork or a simulation that bypasses real-time? Where does the human remain when the artificial learns to narrate itself?

The Metaphor of Extinction

The irony seeps into the experience. The scene of visitors illuminated by the glow of their own phones within a space that speaks of human obsolescence resonates like a cruel wink. Walter Benjamin had already pointed out the loss of aura in the age of technical reproduction, but The Shape of the Future confronts us with a more extreme variation: it is not just art that has become replicable, but the very notion of existence. In this sense, the cyborgs in the exhibition seem to align with Donna Haraway and her Cyborg Manifesto: a reinterpretation of the relationship between bodies and technology where identity ceases to be an absolute and becomes a survival strategy.

Here there is no nostalgia or resistance; the machines have already taken the reins and do so without drama. Terraforming, prosthetics, generative AI, and quantum speculation are merely outlines of a world where the history of being human is just an irrelevant datum in the code of something more vast. The artificial no longer emulates the natural; it has subsumed it.

The Future as a Loop We Already Know

The choice of a visual language based on meticulous drawings that are then digitally transformed evokes the act of 'translating' one vision to another, as if the human gesture still needed a bridge to the machine. But what if the process were already happening in reverse? What if we are the ones being decoded by the algorithms?

The Shape of the Future is not a revelation, but a loop. We are not seeing a distant possibility, but the iteration of an idea that has already taken shape in our way of perceiving, acting, and inhabiting the present. It is the moment when dystopia ceases to be a warning and becomes a daily datum. What is unsettling is that, upon leaving the exhibition, the feeling of strangeness does not dissolve. We are left wondering whether the fiction was in the room or if we brought it with us from before.