The Future is Now : Media, Memory, and the Edges of Reality

Abstract

In an era where artificial intelligence increasingly shapes our visual landscape, The Future is Now investigates the perceptual, psychological, and cultural implications of AI-generated imagery. This thesis explores the erosion of visual trust through a speculative design project that reconfigures the gallery space into a quiet confrontation with digital uncertainty. The final exhibition combines a looping video installation, a grid of 100 mixed-authenticity images, and a tactile intervention of real Icelandic stones—inviting viewers to slow down, examine, and question what they see.Originally conceived as a multi-room speculative narrative spanning centuries, the project was later distilled into a minimalist, media-specific format that draws directly from contemporary behaviors of swiping, scrolling, and rapid content consumption. The pared-down design was not a compromise, but a strategic refinement: an attempt to amplify ambiguity and visual instability without overwhelming the viewer. The exhibition foregrounds interactivity, subtle emotional dissonance, and perceptual friction as tools for provoking critical media literacy.Through this work, I argue that AI’s most insidious effect is not technical, but cognitive. As viewers struggle to differentiate between truth and simulation, they experience first-hand the unreliability of the visual in an increasingly synthetic world. This thesis blends practice-based research, speculative design, and visual analysis to examine how we might recalibrate our senses in response to AI’s rise—not through spectacle, but through quiet resistance.Ultimately, The Future is Now serves as both artwork and inquiry, exploring how art can translate abstract anxieties into embodied experiences. It proposes that in a time of growing digital manipulation, ambiguity itself may be a productive method—an aesthetic of uncertainty that returns agency to the viewer and rekindles a necessary skepticism toward images we too often accept without question.