[Future] Territories

Connect and Play - Transmedia Exhibition

[FUTURE] TERRITORIES is the 2026 edition of […]TERRITORIES, Das LOT’s transmedia exhibition dedicated to interactive, performative and digital artistic practices. Following [LUDIC] TERRITORIES (2024) and [ARTIFICIAL] TERRITORIES (2025), this edition does not attempt to predict the future. Instead, it investigates how the future is already being imagined, constructed and negotiated in the present.

Co-curated by NODE Media Lab, the exhibition approaches the future not as a distant horizon, but as something embedded in infrastructures, encoded in technologies and continuously rehearsed through bodies, environments and emotions. It unfolds as a field of forces in which data, perception, power, and speculation intersect.

Territory, in this context, extends far beyond land or borders. It emerges through post-geographical conditions: data flows, virtual commons, algorithmic governance, ecological thresholds and human–non-human entanglements. These territories are unstable, porous and often invisible, yet they shape how we act, relate and imagine.

Rather than presenting interaction as a neutral interface or playful feature, [FUTURE] TERRITORIES frames it as a political and emancipatory act. Interaction becomes a way of entering and negotiating territory: of crossing thresholds, confronting systems and reclaiming agency in an age of passive consumption.

Extended Description of Artworks:

The exhibition itself operates as a living system, an environment to be navigated, activated and continuously reshaped by its visitors. Within this evolving landscape, the selected works function as entry points into different modalities of the future:

Local Mean Time reconfigures temporal experience, unsettling standardised notions of time by reconnecting it to locality and planetary rhythms. Time becomes a situated, contested territory rather than a universal constant.

Dream Atlas maps the collective subconscious through a participatory digital infrastructure. Individual dreams submitted, processed and visualised in real time form a living constellation of shared symbols and emotions. Through both an online platform and a tactile telescope interface, the work bridges intimate interiority and collective data space, transforming subjective experience into a navigable territory.

In Answer the Call, communication itself becomes an algorithmically governed terrain. Two connected telephones force participants into an escalating vocal exchange, mirroring the amplification logics of social media. What begins as dialogue quickly shifts into competition, exposing how technological systems reshape human interaction and emotional expression.

The Syntactic Synthesizer explores large language models as sites of experimentation rather than optimisation. Through a custom-built interface connected to the physical hardware behind generative systems, visitors collaboratively write, fragment and recombine text. Moving away from dominant narratives of agentic AI, the work draws on traditions of electronic literature and chance-based poetics, reframing LLMs as tools for collective, critical and non-commercial forms of writing.

Phygital Intimacy examines the shifting boundaries between physical and digital presence, questioning how intimacy is mediated, constructed and performed across hybrid environments.

With Ocean Futurisms, speculative narratives intersect with ecological realities, foregrounding oceanic space as both a site of extraction and a carrier of alternative imaginaries. The work situates the future within planetary systems that exceed human control.

su(o)nificated translates long-term solar observation data from ESA and NASA’s Solar and Heliospheric Observatory into an audiovisual experience. By rendering the solar system’s dynamic activity—waves, eruptions and oscillations—into sound and generative visuals, the work makes perceptible phenomena that remain beyond human senses, situating the future within cosmic processes that unfold across vast temporal and spatial scales.

Turnton Gazette operates simultaneously as an artefact and narrative device: a newspaper from 2047 published in the present. Positioned between fiction and foresight, it activates the “possibility sense,” inviting audiences to inhabit a future grounded in collective well-being rather than crisis.

The platform compost.cc shifts attention toward digital decay and regeneration, proposing the internet itself as a composting system in which information, practices, and communities continuously decompose and reconfigure.

REMEMBERING THE FUTURE_Virtual Space extends the exhibition into a distorted virtual twin. Within this evolving environment, visitors encounter traces left by others and contribute their own, forming a participatory archive shaped by memory, misremembering and speculation. The work positions the future as something remembered in advance, continuously rewritten through collective presence.

The opening performance, Uncanny Habitat, under the unmoving Moon, brings the exhibition into an embodied register. Through a decolonial lens, it explores the entanglement of human and non-human agencies, questioning fixed categories and emphasising co-existence as a dynamic, reciprocal process.

Across these works, the future emerges not as a singular vision or distant horizon, but as a dense field of overlapping territories—temporal, technological, ecological and affective—continuously produced through interaction, negotiation and perception. It is not something that awaits us, but something already unfolding, unevenly distributed and materially embedded in the systems we inhabit.

[FUTURE] TERRITORIES calls visitors to move through these conditions actively: to listen, to intervene, to speculate and to situate themselves within systems that are already shaping what is to come.

TIMETABLE

THURSDAY 07.05 - Vernissage
19:00 Vernissage
20:00 Opening Performance by Sunggu Hong

FRIDAY, 08.05 :
14:00 - 19:00 Open

SATURDAY 09.05 - Workshop
14:00 - 19:00 Open
15:00 - 17:00 Open Workshop

SUNDAY 10.05. - Finissage
12:00 - 16:00 Open
13:00 - 14:00 Artist Brunch
14:00 - 15:00 Open Tour with the Curators