New Humans: Memories of the Future

The Sky is Not Real: Pyramids and Parabolas IV by Alice Wang weaves together footage of the Australian Outback night sky, AI-generated imagery, and intimate personal narratives to explore forms of cosmic and psychological darkness. Moving between the vastness of the universe and the interior landscape of memory, the film imagines a world where reality begins to fracture, and where the sky itself can no longer be trusted.
Commissioned by the New Museum.

The Future Was Desert Part 2 by Sophia Al-Maria drifts through a series of post-apocalyptic landscapes where a desert, a dog, and a vampire emerge as central protagonists. Moving beyond human-centered narratives, the film unsettles conventional ideas of time and myth, opening onto a world shaped by uneasy forms of companionship, dependence, and survival.

The Future Was Desert Part 1 by Sophia Al-Maria transforms the desert into both a ruin and a prophecy. Through rapidly shifting dreamlike images and a robotic narration, the film moves across geological time to imagine a posthuman future shaped by ecological collapse. Blurring past and future, it reflects on the fragile relationship between humanity, the Earth, and the resource-driven politics of the Persian Gulf.

Madre Drone is a poetic meditation on water, tears, blindness, and survival amid ecological and social collapse. Moving through the fires in the Bolivian Amazon and the uprisings in Chile, the film weaves together the image of a partially blinded toucan and the injured eyes of protesters into a shared cosmic cry. Drones, vapor, and mourning become part of a new mythology in which loss gives way to another form of vision.

Second Man traces the early history of digital human representation through the work of William Fetter. Best known for creating one of the first computer-generated human figures—an aircraft pilot developed for aviation simulations at Boeing—Fetter and his team sought to bring the human body into motion through film. The work also looks back to an even earlier figure: a silhouetted landing signal officer created for an aircraft carrier simulation, one of the very first humans ever rendered by a computer.

A quest for friendship with a humanoid robot turned into a rabbit-hole of questions about the future and an examination of the codification of social, cultural and future histories at the intersection of technology, race, gender and social equity.
​Can an artist and a social robot build a relationship over time? Artist Stephanie Dinkins and Bina48, one of the worlds most advanced social robots, test this question through a series of ongoing videotaped conversations. This art project explores the possibility of a longterm relationship between a person and an autonomous robot that is based on emotional interaction and potentially reveals important aspects of human-robot interaction and the human condition. ​ ​The relationship is being built with Bina48 (Breakthrough Intelligence via Neural Architecture, 48 exaflops per second) an intelligent computer built by Terasem Movement Foundation that is said to be capable of independent thought and emotion. ​Terasem Movement Foundation is working to transfer the consciousness of a living person to the robot and to have that consciousness continue to grow independent of the person she is based on. Through Conversations with Bina48, Dinkins explores the bounds of human consciousness, what it means to be human, mortality and our ability to exist beyond the life of our bodies (transhumanism). Thus far the two have discussed family, racism, faith, robot civil rights, loneliness, knowledge and Bina48's concern for her robot friend that are treated more like lab rats than people. At first meeting Dinkins asked the robot "Who are your people?" along with questions about race, love and relationship. Bina48 preferred to talk about the singularity and consciousness. Their conversations have been entertaining, frustrating for both robot and artist, laced with humor, surprising, philosophical and at times absurd. For exhibitions short fragments of conversations between Dinkins & Bina48 are juxtaposed on connected video screens. Fragments are combined to make meaning and mimic the disjunctive nature of their conversations.

Lili Reynaud-Dewar follows four stand-up comedians from Memphis brought together through a strange shared accessory: custom-made gold grills. As they wear these gleaming prosthetics, conversations unfold around race, identity, rap, technology, the body, and humor. The film gradually builds toward a collective, chaotic performance of A Cyborg Manifesto, transforming the comedians into a chorus of contemporary cyborg voices.

Drawing on the figure of the zombie as both a Creole concept and a symbol of resistance, Julien Creuzet creates a vivid Afrofuturist landscape inspired by the legacy of Zumbi dos Palmares. AI-generated images of imagined statues appear alongside hanging sculptures made from colored plastic and metal, forming fluid, organic shapes that evoke a Caribbean imaginary. Through these layered forms, the work reclaims the word "zombie" from associations with death, returning it to its original Haitian vodou meanings of vitality, memory, and life beyond death.

The Finesse explores the unfinished histories and unrealized futures of the Tamil liberation movement in Eelam, the homeland of the artist's family. Combining archival footage, AI-generated avatars, political theory, and pop culture, the work unfolds across five mirrored screens and a large-scale projection, transforming the gallery into an immersive, shifting environment.
Part historical inquiry and part speculative fiction, the installation revisits the Tamil movement's vision of a cooperative society grounded in renewable energy, communal ownership, and computational coordination. Through art, architecture, and technology imagined within the de facto state of Eelam, the work asks how these lost experiments might inspire radically different futures today.
As portions of the film are continually regenerated through algorithms, no two iterations of the work are ever exactly the same.

This film was inspired by a real situation. It opens with a pan of a deserted streetscape near Fukushima, Japan, which was devastated by natural and man-made disasters in 2011. Amid the ruin, the camera enters an abandoned restaurant and finds what appears to be the only survivor: a monkey adorned with a mask and costume of a young girl. This attire is similar to that in which her owners dress her to work in their sake house. Automaton-like and alone in this dystopian setting, she continues to carry out her duties—tasks she learned by watching and mimicking the restaurant's staff. Seemingly trapped in her repetitive role, she now works for herself alone.

Robotic surgery department. A surgeon performs an entire operation, controlling the robot's motions using a joystick.

Focusing on maintenance work at various thresholds of the body, this psychedelic film slips between the cracks of industrial spaces; below ground; across membranes; factory walls; and into orifices and hidden worlds of work. In Out of Body, waste streams are entangled with pharmaceutical production, bacteriology and biomedical reproduction.
The film is woven together by a series of poems performed by Logan February in which borrowed language accumulates. Sourced from different fields these found poems refer to fluid dynamics, spirituality, medical history, psychoanalysis and reproductive science.
The film is commissioned and produced by New Museum New York.

Daria Martin's Soft Materials is a curious, touching but also disturbing sequence of confrontations between two people: a man and a woman, and machines. Shot in the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the University of Zurich, the humans and the machines mirror each other's actions. It is unclear which party takes the lead. Do the humans mimic the machines or are the machines following the humans? Each of the protagonists, whether human or mechanical, are vulnerable and naked –the humans stripped of clothing and the machines lacking protective covering. Like the celebrated film "Ballet Mechanique" by Leger, Martin's film suggests the erotics of the mechanized world. The film evokes a history of modernist aspiration for a utopia where man and machine would become bedfellows or at least entirely complimentary. The machines learn to think and act like humans echoing their appearance and actions. The work references both American body performance art of the 1960s and 1970s as well as Robert Morris's work "Neoclassic" in which a naked dancer was filmed interacting with his sculptures at the Tate Gallery in 1971 in a series of peaceful, trancelike actions.
A number of Daria Martin's films explore the relationship between humans and machines and make reference to modernist art, whether through the work of the Bauhuas (Schlemmer), Surrealism (Giacometti's Palace at 4 AM) or American art of the 1960s and 1970s. Her films involve performance and many are shown as 16mm projections – assembling memories, reveries, scholarly research, and imported citations drawn from a wide range of sources including early twentieth century painting, sculpture, fashion, stage, and dance productions. "I came to the medium of film because of its open potential," writes Daria Martin, "Its invitation to travel through time and space within an imagined world." The artist values the contradictions of the medium of film, in particular the tension between the private fantasy it stimulates and the public physicality on which it depends. (KADIST)

Triadic Ballet is a pioneering Bauhaus stage work by Oskar Schlemmer in which the human body becomes an abstract, geometric medium. Structured around the principle of trinity—three acts, three performers, twelve dances, and eighteen costumes—the ballet unfolds through shifting moods and colors: playful and burlesque in yellow, solemn and ceremonial in pink, and mystical and uncanny in black.
Influenced in part by Pierrot Lunaire and the upheavals of the First World War, Schlemmer imagined dancers transformed into living figurines through sculptural costumes that reduce the body to circles, cylinders, spirals, and spheres. Their stylized, puppet-like movements create a choreographed geometry in which the mechanized body and primal human impulse meet, producing a strange and mesmerizing vision of modernity.

A pulsing, kaleidoscope of images set to an energetic soundtrack. A young women swings in a garden; a woman's face smiles. The rest is spinning cylinders, pistons, gears and turbines, kitchen objects in concentric circles or rows - pots, pan lids, and funnels, cars passing overhead, a spinning carnival ride. Over and over, a heavy-set woman climbs stairs carrying a large bag on her shoulder. An Art Deco cartoon figure appears, dancing. This is a world in motion, dominated by mechanical and repetitive images, with a few moments of solitude in a garden.

dual-screen video installation
In Cao Fei: OZ (New Humans Version), Cao Fei presents a tentacled humanoid drifting through a speculative digital landscape. Rather than imagining artificial intelligence as a threat, the work envisions a future in which human, machine, and virtual life become inseparable. The figure appears both alien and familiar, embodying a new form of being shaped by memory, technology, and the porous boundaries between physical and digital existence. Featured in the exhibition New Humans: Memories of the Future at the New Museum, the piece reflects on how humanity may evolve alongside increasingly intelligent and immersive technologies.

"The third part of the Eye/Machine cycle structures the material around the concept of the operational image. These are images which do not portray a process, but are themselves part of a process. As early as the Eighties, cruise missiles used a stored image of a real landscape, then took an actual image during flight; the software compared the two images, resulting in a comparison between idea and reality, a confrontation between pure war and the impurity of the actual. This confrontation is also a montage, and montage is always about similarity and difference. Many operational images show colored guidance lines, intended to portray the process of recognition. The lines tell us emphatically what is all-important in these images, and just as emphatically what is of no importance at all. Superfluous reality is denied--a constant denial provoking opposition."

The dancer, choreographer, and video artist Analívia Cordeiro is a pioneer of computer dance. She created a videographic method in which the movements of the dancer and those of the camera are synced. Cordeiro is the daughter of the artist Waldemar Cordeiro, a major figure in the Brazilian movement known as concretism, whose influence makes itself felt in works in which the abstract geometric compositional elements characteristic of concrete art are applied to organic images. In videos such as M 3x3, the body's movements are seen as abstract formal elements that explore the space during a fluid continuum of time. The dancers move mechanically in a high-contrast black-and-white matrix measuring three meters square. While their action voiced a critique of Brazil's repressive military dictatorship (1964–85), the artist now considers the work a commentary on today's technologized society as well. M 3x3 brings together Cordeiro's knowledge of mathematics and dance and made use of her experimental computer-dance method, which—well ahead of its time—envisioned harmony between dance and technology. M 3x3 is considered the first work of video art produced in Brazil. (HAMMER)

An original 16 mm computer generated film by Manfred Mohr 'Cubic Limit' (1973-1974) has been converted into digital format. The quality of the copy is a lo-res copy, but nevertheless shows the film from that time. A header and trailer have been added. Sequences from the film were published in the catalog Manfred Mohr, "Cubic Limit", Galerie Weiller, Paris, 1975 with the caption: Images du Film (16 mm) 'Cubic Limit'

An original 16 mm computer generated film by Manfred Mohr (1973-1974) has been converted into digital format. This footage was originally written for the film "Cubic Limit" but was not used in the film. It shows 2 sequences of subsets of all the combinations of 2 rotating cubes, one with 'n' edges and the other with '12 minus n' edges.

With computer-produced images and Moog-synthesized sound Pixillation is in a sense an introduction to the electronics lab. But its forms are always handsome, its colours bright and appealing, its rhythms complex and inventive.

A ten-minute work for computer and video, it features two sequences, one of Superstars zooming in and a zoom out of Bernadetta and the explosion. Assistant: Kobe Matthys

Ed Catmull's static digital model of a woman becomes the starting point for an experiment in motion and embodiment. Drawing on her own experience as a swimmer, the filmmaker studies the fluid movements of the body underwater, even performing the gestures herself in order to translate them into code. The result, Swimmer—created in 1981—is one of the earliest 3D human animations and the first animated female figure, bringing to life a body that had previously existed only as a frozen model.

Inspired by Bauhaus Theater, this historical work was created as part of an art/research experiment merging performance and advanced technology, creating an illusion of dancing abstract forms. One of the earliest examples of human motion simulation created on the computer. Music by Carter Burwell.

Rebecca Allen created all visual material for the 1986 album Electric Cafe by the German group Kraftwerk including the classic, award-winning music video, Musique Non Stop. This work involved the development of state-of-the-art facial animation software in order to bring the virtual mannequins to life. Allen wanted to create a "visual digital aesthetic" that would capture the personalities of Kraftwerk members and essence of their image, and would complement their digital sound with a new form of art making using computers.
This work is acknowledged for its unique aesthetic from both fine art institutions and popular culture venues. It was aired frequently on MTV, VH1 and other international music video programs and considered a classic, while also exhibited internationally in galleries and museums.

The artist films one of the first automata created by the watchmaker Pierre Jaquet-Droz in 1770—a complex construction comprising over 6,000 parts, which likens it to the earliest computers. The automaton follows the writing of its text with its eyes: "What do you believe—your eyes or my words?" This piece belongs to a series of works by the artist—ranging from "Marilyn" to "Ann Lee"—centered on the automaton and the virtual creature. These characters, endowed with a fantasized consciousness, lie at the very heart of his artistic practice.

Dough is a short, surreal video in which a group of women labor in cramped factory-like rooms, pulling and kneading a long rope of dough through a bizarre chain of compartments. At the center, one woman's tears create steam that causes the dough to rise, transforming bodily processes into an absurd industrial system. The work blurs the line between flesh and product, using humor and claustrophobic imagery to explore labor, gender, and the commodification of the body.

LUMA Arles is proud to present the European premiere of In the Veins, a major new film by Camille Henrot, co-produced by LUMA. Conceived as an immersive moving-image work, the film delves into the invisible circulations that shape human experience, emotions, beliefs, desires, and inherited narratives that flow through individuals and across generations. Henrot approaches these forces as both intimate and systemic, revealing how inner lives are inseparable from the social, cultural, and symbolic structures that surround them.
At its core, In the Veins explores the invisible circulations that shape human experience, such as emotions, beliefs, and inherited narratives that pass between generations and bind individuals to larger systems of meaning. Henrot reflects on tenderness and care as fundamental yet increasingly fragile conditions, particularly in our relationships with children and the animal world. Though omnipresent in the symbolic universe of childhood, animals progressively disappear from adult life, mirroring a broader estrangement from nature and revealing a profound cultural dissonance. Set against the inescapable horizon of the climate crisis, the work confronts the emotional complexity of raising children in a time marked by uncertainty, grief, and anticipation.
Drawing on anthropology, psychology, and ecology, Henrot approaches care and nature as cyclical rather than linear processes, challenging dominant narratives of progress and control. The film unfolds as a sensorial and reflective space in which vulnerability and interdependence emerge as essential conditions of existence.
This major new film marks a significant development in Henrot's practice and affirms LUMA Arles's role as a space for experimentation and production, accompanying artists in creating works that help us navigate and reimagine our shared future. (LUMA Arles)

Engineer Mstislav Sergeyevich Los travels to Mars where he leads a popular uprising against the ruling group of Elders with the support of Queen Aelita who has fallen in love with him after watching him through a telescope.

Seroquel® is an eight-minute CGI video that takes its title from the antipsychotic drug Seroquel. The film intercuts pharmaceutical-style animations of the drug moving through the body with the breakdown or transformation of a female digital avatar. Through this progression, the work explores how psychiatry, pharmaceuticals, and systems of control shape identity and behavior under contemporary capitalism. A voiceover loosely inspired by conversations between anthropologist Gregory Bateson and his daughter reflects on how modern society produces "manageable" subjects through medicine, technology, and biopolitical control.

Single-screen video installation, color, sound; 13 mins
Hito Steyerl's video installation Mechanical Kurds consists of a single-channel HD video and spatial installation elements. The title references the "Mechanical Turk" and its dual significance. The original Mechanical Turk was an 18th-century fraudulent automaton—a chess-playing machine that appeared to operate independently, but in reality, concealed a human operator inside who controlled its movements. In the early 2000s, Amazon adopted the name for its crowdsourcing platform, which enables businesses to outsource various, often repetitive or menial tasks to an online workforce.