the future is now: MEDIA, MEMORY, AND THE EDGES OF REALITY
May 2025, Listaháskóli Íslands MA graduate exhibition at Á Milli
Real? or AI?
What happens when the fiction looks just enough like something you think you have seen?
The Future is Now was an exhibition about what happens when we can no longer trust what we see. It mixes real Icelandic photographs and footage with AI-generated images and puts them side by side with no labels, so the line between the two disappears.
The work pushes back against how we usually take in media: fast scrolling, autoplay, and accepting whatever passes in front of us. Instead it asks visitors to slow down, lean in, compare, and doubt their first instinct.
The project started as ARKÆV, a sprawling world set in a far-future Iceland. ARKÆV was a fictional archive that preserved scent, seeds, and memory against climate collapse, until its AI began to misremember. Then one question in a critique changed everything: “Why are you setting this so far in the future, when it’s happening now?” The world got smaller and the message got sharper. The project no longer tells a speculative story. It stages one.
The Exhibition
The Grid. 100 portrait images, each 10×13cm, hung in a 20×5 grid that echoed an Instagram feed. Some are real, some are AI, and some are a mixture of both. Each image had a number, and a printed key showed the answers, so visitors could check their instincts.
The Loop. In a darker corner, a video played in 3-second clips; the rhythm of social media where attention is won or lost in mere seconds. Small glitches and surreal transitions are hidden in the flow. The clips varied in "reality" just as the photos in the grid.
The Stone. At the center of the room was one large stone gathered by hand, able to be touched and felt. Evidence of a place, not pixels: a reassurance of certainty.
Why Iceland?
I chose Icelandic landscapes as the visual foundation for this project not only because of their obvious local resonance, but because they offer a quiet, non-confrontational entry point for critical reflection.
These images are not overtly political or shocking—they are calm, familiar, and nostalgic. For Icelanders, especially, they might prompt a subtle pause: “Have I seen this place before? Is that waterfall real?”
This deliberate ambiguity invites viewers to approach, inspect, and linger. The danger lies not in the landscapes themselves, but in how easily they can be manipulated.
If I can achieve this level of visual familiarity in just a few weeks, with minimal resources and widely accessible AI tools, what else could be done, and to whom?
What happens when the subject isn't so warm or welcoming, but instead emotionally or politically charged? The project, then, becomes a quiet warning: even the most benign image can become a vehicle for distortion.
Research & context: A short history of believing
None of this is new. We’ve always been fooled by images.
The difference now is the speed and the scale.
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The Vegetable Lamb of Tartary (c. 14th century), a medieval myth of a plant that grew lambs, probably came from Europeans encountering cotton for the first time. When we don’t understand something, we fill the gap with imagination. AI does the same.
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The Feejee Mermaid (1842). P.T. Barnum put a monkey torso stitched to a fish tail on display, and crowds came anyway. The spectacle mattered more than the truth.
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The Cottingley Fairies (1917). Two girls made five photographs of fairies, and Arthur Conan Doyle believed them. Photography was new, and people trusted it completely. The problem isn’t that people are tricked. It’s that they want to believe.
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The Enfield Haunting (1977). Even after the story was debunked, it stuck. What feels real shapes memory as much as what is real.
As AI becomes part of how we remember, feel, (and even vote), the job of artists and designers is to show the seams: the moments when the illusion falters and the glitch shows through.
If even one viewer left the exhibition and scrolled more slowly, began to question more often and thoroughly… the project succeeded.
Concept, curation, research, exhibition design: Kate Scott Stewart
AI image/video generation and all "real" photographs and videos: Kate Scott Stewart
Tools: Midjourney, ImagineArt, Runway, Sora, iPhone 13 Pro, Canva