What Will the Future Be Like? These Objects Help Us Imagine

LONDON — It’s just after 2 a.m. in Los Angeles and Oumarou Idrissa is awake. He opens his Uber app and in London, a curtain opens.

At the Victoria and Albert Museum here, Idrissa’s sleep and app-use habits are on display in “I’m the President, Baby,” a collaborative piece he created with the artist Miranda July.

Idrissa is a Los Angeles-based Uber driver who came to the United States from Niger. He suffers from persistent insomnia. The work charts his sleep habits and his use of the apps WhatsApp, Uber and Instagram in real-time for viewers in London. Each of the four curtains is linked to a specific action: When Idrissa wakes up or opens an app, a set of curtains open; when he closes an app, or goes to sleep, another set closes.

The piece is part of the show “The Future Starts Here,” running through Nov. 4. The show assembles objects — some prototypes of advanced technology, some so familiar they may seem old-fashioned — and artworks that serve as starting points for imagining possible futures and examining the complexities of modern life.

Sit down at a table for one, with a bottle of the meal-replacement drink Soylent, in a re-creation of a Dutch restaurant for solo diners. Marvel at the models of planned floating cities, or a 13-year-old’s vision of a rebuilt Aleppo. Pick up a book from a library curated for the end of civilization, and read.

Alongside these there are works of art, like July and Idrissa’s. “I’m the President, Baby” is a lens into issues of migration, app-based communication, the gig economy, surveillance, social media and privacy — all that from four sets of elegant curtains, opening and closing on a museum wall.

July first met Idrissa when he was her Uber driver in Los Angeles in 2015. She was on the way to interview the pop star Rihanna, for a profile in T: The New York Times Style Magazine. They got to talking, eventually, about his trouble sleeping. Idrissa said his insomnia started in about 2006. He came to the United States on a student visa, which expired. “I was supposed to be deported, and they sent me a letter,” Idrissa said in a recent interview. He said that one day the immigration authorities “came to my door at 4 or 5 in the morning and the lady there wouldn’t let them in. So there were three or four years of just hiding, and I sleep only a couple hours a night.” Now, Idrissa is a citizen of the United States, but the insomnia hasn’t left. He says he often spends hours awake on his bed, scrolling through apps.

“I remember I told him about the trauma of the birth of my child,” July said. “I had this rough, rough birth, and I was really quite sad. We were both talking about a trauma that wasn’t really leaving our bodies.” She said the conversation stayed with her, and that when she was commissioned to make a work for the Victoria and Albert show she thought of Idrissa. He agreed to work on it with her, despite July’s initial concern that the project was too invasive.

“It’s making something into a civilized object that’s also kind of a distressing feeling potentially, or at least unsettling,” July said.

Many of the objects and artworks in the “The Future Starts Here” could be described that way. The show is sprawling, overwhelming, awash with screen light. The half-familiar automated sounds of Siri and Alexa’s voices pulsate on repeat in parts of the gallery, along with the buzz of futuristic music. The exhibition itself is beautifully housed and designed, in bright neon and pastel colors. It’s divided into four thematic areas — Self, Public, Planet and Afterlife — though these arenas feel porous.

Some objects in the show may be familiar to us, even quotidian, depending how plugged in we are: Alexa, the iPhone, a Nest thermostat. Others we might have read about online — a robotic stuffed seal that can cuddle you to sleep, a robot named Brett that can fold laundry (slowly), a prototype of a self-driving car that talks to passengers while it drives. Other objects may be entirely disconnected from our daily realities: a cryopreservation unit, for instance, a coffin-like pod that can store recently deceased people’s bodies in liquid nitrogen at minus 320 degrees. (One day, some believe, technology will exist that can reawaken them from death.)

The exhibition’s co-curator, Rory Hyde, said he wasn’t sure the museum could have done the show five years ago, when digitization seemed to sound the death knell for physical objects.

“But objects are relevant again,” he said, “when you think about the self-driving car, or Facebook’s aircraft. Even the tech companies are moving back into physical engineering.”

Mariana Pestana, the show’s other co-curator, said: “Objects have this incredible capacity to embody visions. We think of these objects as beginnings that open up a set of possibilities.” To walk into the show is to be confronted by big questions in all-caps text: “What Makes Us Human?” “Is Edward Snowden a Hero or a Traitor?” “We Are All Connected, but Do We Feel Lonely?” The wall text explores nightmare scenarios and seeks to maintain optimism, often at the same time. The questions present an alternative to tech evangelism and extreme pessimism, but sometimes as a framing device they can feel didactic.

The effect, though, is to make us realize how little we know the answers to these questions, and how uncertain we are about what the world will look like in five years, much less 50. The objects succeed in imbuing their own wonder and terror.

There are some historical objects in the show as well — an early home telephone and a celestial globe from around 1627 — that allow viewers to consider just how much and how rapidly society and the objects in it have changed. A scarf that reads “Votes for Women” reminds us that 2018 is the centennial of women’s right to vote in Britain.

“We’re now at the centenary of the first women’s vote in the U.K.,” Pestana said. “A hundred years ago this idea that women could vote was a radical idea, and not a plausible future. Nowadays it’s something of the norm, at least in the West, so we wanted to use this object to consider that some of the ideas in the show, even if they seem radical and implausible, maybe they’re not, maybe they can be the future.” Perhaps the most moving parts of the show are the artistic works, like July and Idrissa’s, that respond in some way to the too-much-ness of contemporary and future life. They’re interspersed throughout the show, among the objects themselves.

There are two of the well-known Chelsea Manning portraits by Heather Dewey-Hagborg, which the artist reconstructed using samples of Manning’s DNA and a 3D printer while Manning was in prison. There’s also a pair of photographs, taken by Hanif Shoaei, that document couples in bed. In one, they sit apart, their faces aglow with light of their phone screens. The scene is both otherworldly and familiar.

Almost easy to miss, tucked next to a splashy poster that reads, “Campaign to Stop Killer Robots,”is a stuffed panda. You might walk right past it, or take it for another version of the cuddle-you-to-sleep robot seal.

It’s actually part of Ai Weiwei and Jacob Appelbaum’s 2015 work “Panda to Panda.” The panda is stuffed with shredded government documents and a memory card containing information leaked by the former National Security Agency contractor Edward J. Snowden. A series of these pandas were sent to dissidents around the world, creating what Appelbaum called a “distributed backup” of the politically sensitive documents they had published. “Panda to Panda” is also an art piece about subverting state power, surveillance and secrets. This particular panda, the wall text notes, is on loan from Julian Assange.

“The safest place to put these things is in a museum, a gallery, where it’s protected as an object,” Appelbaum said, in a video about the piece.

And there it sits, an object among the other objects — simultaneously a piece of art, a thing, a part of history and a harbinger of possible futures.