100 Years From Now was a city-wide public art intervention in Rome.[+] One thousand signs displaying five open-ended phrases challenged citizens to consider the future we are each making. The project used calculated ambiguity to compel each of us to confront, or to deny, the larger signs that point to our collective future.[+]

100 years after Italian Futurism’s violent celebration of a world to come — one that would be built of technology, industrialization, youth, and speed — the project asks how we feel about the present these values have created, and the future they now suggest. One thousand signs were installed in key districts of Rome — each displaying one of five ambiguous phrases. Each phrase referenced our growing awareness of the forces that are shaping our future: digital technology, social control, time limits, and the declining natural environment. Together the phrases create a five-line poem whose structure, tone, and associations leverage Futurist ideas of provocation and disruption. The individual phrases were tagged in Google Adwords so that online searches linked users directly to a forum website. The site collected and shared the thoughts of the entire city as it attempted to reconcile hopes from the past with our emerging anxieties about the future.

Dimensions: 1.5 x 1 m