What does the future actually look like? Not tomorrow according to the calendar, but the one that gets imagined, painted, and built as huge exhibition spaces? That has been the question driving artists now for over a century, and the answers keep getting increasingly bizarre and politically charged.
Artists portraying tomorrow are not really making predictions. They are doing something more interesting: showing you the hopes and blind spots of the moment they are living in, pressed into color, composition, and form. Every painted city of tomorrow is secretly a portrait of today.
When Speed Became Something You Could Paint: Futurism's Imagined Futures
The Futurist Manifesto penned by Marinetti was published on February 20, 1909 in the pages of the Paris newspaper Le Figaro where he proclaimed that the need had arisen to have art take hold of the machines, energy, and vitality of industry and discard anything from the past. The next year, five Italian painters—Giacomo Balla, Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, Luigi Russolo, and Gino Severini—published their manifesto and began working out their ideas artistically.
The major issue of their work: how can you present an image that conveys movement? One of the answers to this problem offered by Boccioni in his painting The City Rises (1910) was to divide the image into colored diagonal planes, blending horses into people, people into scaffolds, creating an overall dynamic tilt.
1910, Umberto Boccioni, Wikimedia Commons / Public Domain, reproduced for commentary and analysis.
We continue to appreciate this image for its space rather than for its horses. A city mid-construction, mid-blur, already beyond anyone's full control.
Balla took the same question somewhere quieter. In Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash (1912), a dachshund's legs multiply into a blurring fan of ghostly limbs. The leash catches the light in four distinct arcs. The owner's feet dissolve into dashed repetition. Since Balla had been looking into the art of chronophotography, which was also the medium that Muybridge used to dissect animal movement, the painting makes the scientific endeavor both accurate and ridiculous.
1912, Giacomo Balla, Buffalo AKG Art Museum (via Wikipedia; US public domain), reproduced for commentary and analysis. Balla estate copyright in Italy until 2029; flag before publication.
The color scheme was just as calculated as the composition. Yellows, greens, oranges, and blues formed a temperature that was urgent and made for an urban poster crowd and not an art gallery setting. These were colors that read fast.
By 1911, Boccioni's States of Mind: The Farewells pushed further still. Railway engines, figures, and smoke spiral into a vortex of arcs, the only fixed point a locomotive's number floating at the center. The painting feels less like a train station and more like a diagram of what separation does to a person.
1911, Umberto Boccioni, Wikimedia Commons / Public Domain, reproduced for commentary and analysis.
We find this more unsettling than The City Rises for a simple reason. The Futurists were claiming that modern life had changed not just how things moved, but how emotion moved through a person.
What Mid-Century Imagined Futures Actually Reveal?
By the 1950s, the visual language of the future was comfortable and secure. There were chrome surfaces, streamlined forms, pastel rockets, and domed cities hovering above perfectly planned suburbs in magazines, World’s Fairs, and pulp science fiction alike.
Albert Robida had been doing a version of this much earlier. His 1882 illustration Leaving the Opera in the Year 2000 shows Paris filled with aerial buses, private flying carriages, and women at the controls of their own aircraft, rendered in the busy, cross-hatched linework of the French illustrated press.
Circa 1882, Albert Robida, Wikimedia Commons / Public Domain, reproduced for commentary and analysis.
Women flying their own vehicles in 1882 was not an idle detail. Robida understood something that a lot of later retrofuturism forgot: imagining the future is also a social question, not just a technological one.
By the 1970s, NASA had extended that optimism into actual space planning. Rick Guidice's paintings for NASA Ames Research Center showed the interiors of massive cylindrical space colonies, green and sunlit, with residents living in what looked like suburban California comfort several thousand miles above Earth.
1970s, Rick Guidice / NASA Ames Research Center, Wikimedia Commons / Public Domain, reproduced for commentary and analysis.
We return to these paintings because of what they quietly erase. Mid-century futures imagined abundance and said nothing about ecology. They imagined automation and skipped the question of who got displaced. Every failed future vision is an accidental document of its era's specific blindnesses.
Who Gets to Imagine the Future: Afrofuturism's Visual Answer
Throughout most of the twentieth century, the future in Western science fiction resided in a particular demographic neighborhood. So embedded were those conventions in the imagery of the genre that they didn’t even seem like conscious choices.
Sun Ra was deconstructing this convention from the late 1950s. The eccentric jazz musician from Alabama who hailed from Saturn had constructed the Intergalactic Solar Arkestra into an equally spectacular performance art. This performance art consisted not only of music but of visual elements as well, such as the glittering homemade costumes featuring Egyptian mythology mixed with futuristic motifs, including ibises’ heads and celestial signs on robes. The look was not decoration. It was an argument.
His Saturn Records album covers, designed and produced by hand within the Arkestra community, carried the same logic. Space Is the Place (1973) used a gatefold cover photograph of Ra in full Egyptian-influenced regalia, radar-antenna headdress included. The typography was hand-lettered and sometimes misaligned. These were not polished commercial objects; they were manuscripts of a parallel cosmology.
1973, Sun Ra performing, photograph by Franz Schuck, Wikimedia Commons (verify exact license before publication), reproduced for commentary and analysis.
Our fascination with Sun Ra’s visual aesthetic comes from its complete cohesion. The Egyptian symbols, the space-age costume, the handmade covers – all of these tell the same story, though in a different medium: our African heritage and our future beyond Earth can coexist.
“Afrofuturism” was first used in the year 1993 by Mark Dery, an American cultural critic, but Afrofuturism as a movement came into existence before the coining of this word. Afrofuturism: A History of Black Futures is an art exhibition of the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture that displays the entire history of Afrofuturism from its origins to its presence in comic book covers, film costumes, fashion designs, and installations.
Visually, Afrofuturism teaches us a very simple but extremely important lesson: the future is not a neutral territory. Whoever appears in it, whoever builds it, whoever its cities are designed for, these are choices dressed up as aesthetics.
Speculative Design and Ecological Imagined Futures
The contemporary artist and designer community no longer tries to predict the future. Instead, they create alternative worlds and then ask you to be immersed in those in order to discover their price.
The exhibition “Design and Violence,” curated by Paola Antonelli in 2013 at the Museum of Modern Art, was based on designed artifacts that could initiate debates around drones, surveillance technologies, protest methods, and autonomous weaponry. Thus, in this case, the process of curation did not separate the design artifact from its social context, and debates that took place in the museum were among the most interesting ones ever organized in the design exhibition at MoMA.
The Weather Project at Tate Modern by Olafur Eliasson took things further down the sensory route. A semi-circular electric disc and a ceiling of mirrors created a false sun inside the Turbine Hall. Visitors lay on the floor and looked up at a sky that was not a sky.
2003, Olafur Eliasson, The Weather Project, Tate Modern, London, Wikimedia Commons (verify license before use), reproduced for commentary and analysis.
We think about this installation every time climate art gets discussed. Eliasson explained nothing. He made you feel, briefly, what a manufactured atmosphere costs.
The visual shift in contemporary ecological art is legible at the level of palette. Earlier futurist imagery shared a general brightness and vertical ambition, rockets launching, towers rising, cities climbing skyward. Climate-oriented work tends toward harder contrasts: deep ochres, dried-earth reds, and flooded blues in the same frame. The composition has gone lateral rather than vertical, humans sharing the frame with non-human species, infrastructure dissolving back into landscape.
Every Image of Tomorrow Eventually Becomes History
There is an odd loop at the center of all future-oriented art. Every image of tomorrow eventually becomes evidence of when it was made. Boccioni's 1910 Futurism now reads as a record of early industrial anxiety and nationalist energy. The NASA colony paintings are documents of postwar optimism and its specific domestic assumptions. Cyberpunk neon cities are historical evidence of 1980s fears about corporate surveillance and urban inequality.
Contemporary AI-generated imagery, with its smooth surfaces and uncanny resemblances, will almost certainly look to future viewers exactly like a document of our cultural moment: the unease, the facility, the wanting and the dread pressed into a synthetic image that looks plausible enough to be troubling.
Singapore's ArtScience Museum and Tokyo's Mori Art Museum have built programming models around this understanding, treating speculative exhibitions as tools for what researchers call Futures Literacy, the practiced capacity to imagine multiple possible tomorrows clearly enough to choose among them. Art does not predict. Imagination training is to bear the complex while not reducing everything to one story.
Imagining the Future Is Always an Argument about the Present
One of the most telling aspects of The City Rises is not how exciting the future will be. It is how the present is currently changing faster than anyone can keep track of it. However, Afro-Futurism does not predict an equitable future racially, but insists on it through the act of imagining the future enough to want it. Ecological speculative art does not envision the post-carbon future; it makes the issue too real to be ignored.
None of this is prediction. All of it is pressure. An image arrives, changes something about what seems possible, and the world is slightly different for having seen it.
We think imagined futures in art have always been working on the present. They are not dispatches from tomorrow. They are arguments, in color and composition and form, about what today is getting wrong and what tomorrow could get right. That is what makes them worth looking at carefully. It is also what makes them worth collecting.
