Which Future Do You Want to Live in?

I want­ed to chal­lenge the com­mon feel­ing that there are no alter­na­tives to the way our soci­ety works today. To achieve that I tried to make struc­tur­al prob­lems vis­i­ble in a way that any­one can con­nect with. My aim was to cre­ate a space where dif­fer­ent pos­si­bil­i­ties for our future could be felt and explored.

I devel­oped “Which Future Do You Want to Live in?” 2025 at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Applied Sci­ences St. Pöl­ten for my bachelor’s the­sis. It was first exhib­it­ed at the Lucid Dreams Fes­ti­val.

The project presents two very dif­fer­ent ver­sions of what life might look like in the year 2048, based on the ideas in the book Future for All: A Vision for 2048. I used two styles from sci­ence fic­tion to show these paths: “solarpunk” and “cyber­punk”. The solarpunk side rep­re­sents a world where we use tech­nol­o­gy to live in bal­ance with nature and focus on peo­ple’s needs. The cyber­punk side shows a world where tech­nol­o­gy has advanced, but the qual­i­ty of life has dropped and com­mu­ni­ties have been frac­tured. These aren’t meant to be far-off fan­tasies, but real­is­tic extrap­o­la­tions of where we might be head­ing.

This project was exhib­it­ed in my home coun­try, Aus­tria. To make the visions feel per­son­al, I chose real places in Aus­tria that peo­ple encounter in their dai­ly lives. I used Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence as a tool to trans­form pho­tos of loca­tions like Mari­ahil­fer Straße in Vien­na and the March­feld in Low­er Aus­tria into these two pos­si­ble futures. By see­ing famil­iar streets and land­scapes changed by either care or neglect, the goal was to show that the future is some­thing hap­pen­ing right here, to us.

The final work was an instal­la­tion in a dark room where two large screens faced each oth­er. The floor in the cen­ter was marked as the “Present”. From that spot, you could move toward one future or the oth­er. I cre­at­ed “sound atmos­pheres” for each side using field recordings—like the sound of birds and bicy­cles on one side, and noisy machines and heavy traf­fic on the oth­er. Through this set­up, I tried to make the phys­i­cal and emo­tion­al dif­fer­ence between them some­thing you can expe­ri­ence for your­self.

Thanks

Markus Win­ters­berg­er

Mar­cus-Josef Weiss

Fabi­an Kindl

Chris­t­ian Munk

Christoph Kir­maier

Felix Bet­zen­bich­ler

Rosa Hav­el

Max Peter­nell

Vic­tor Schetinger

Gra­ziele Laut­en­schlaeger