Staging Futures: Exhibition Making and Design as a Speculation Apparatus

The promise and menace of the future occupies a special place in our collective subconscious—and increasingly, across multiple industries. From speculative design to corporate foresight, from worldbuilding for cinema to new immersive media, the image of the future is being refracted into a widening spectrum of visions and horizons. The plural notion of 'futures' suggests a multiplicity of trajectories and choices for the society and for humankind. How are cultural institutions tapping into this contemporary gyre of obsessing about futures? How can the apparatus of an exhibition, or a spectacle in any tactile or immersive medium, facilitate encounters with the emergent and invite audiences to engage with futures? And what are the specific contributions of architectural speculation—an integral part of architectural pedagogy, discipline, and practice—to the landscape of futures thinking? In this panel discussion, four practitioners demonstrate and discuss how curation, exhibition architecture, and concept, narrative, and production design across the narrative arts can make the future come alive—as windows onto what may or may not come to pass, or as a means of cultural engineering in the present.

Speakers:

• Adam Bandler, Principal, OFICINA.LA; Exhibition Designer, Views of Planet City
  
• Doris Berger, Vice-President, Curatorial Affairs, Academy Museum; Curator, Cyberpunk: Envisioning Possible Futures through Cinema
• Samantha Culp, Writer, Filmmaker, and Strategist
• Nora N. Khan, independent critic, essayist, curator, editor, and educator

Convened and Moderated by:

• Namik Mackic, Research Program Manager, SCI-Arc; Organizer, Views of Planet City

Adam Bandler is a designer, educator, curator, and co-founder of OFICINA.LA, a Los Angeles and Mexico City-based architecture office. As the former Assistant Director of Exhibitions at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, he has co-curated and designed numerous exhibitions in New York, LA, Chicago, and abroad, and has participated in many art and architecture biennials and triennials. He has collaborated with several artists as an exhibition designer, notably with Tony Oursler for his Imponderable exhibition at MoMA, where he designed a 100-seat ‘5-D’ holographic cinema. Before becoming a Lecturer in History and Theory at Otis College of Art and Design (2020-), he was a consultant for the USC School of Architecture (2018-19), and was an Adjunct Assistant Professor of Architecture at Columbia University GSAPP (2013-17). He holds an M.S. in Critical, Curatorial, and Conceptual Practices in Architecture from Columbia University GSAPP (2011), and a B. Arch from SCI-Arc (2008). His exhibitions work can be seen at adambandler.com and architectural work at oficina.la

Doris Berger is a curator, scholar, and author. As Vice President of Curatorial Affairs at the Academy Museum, she oversees the museum’s curatorial department, shapes the overall exhibitions program with leadership, and curates exhibitions. She was previously a Getty postdoctoral fellow, a curator at the Skirball Cultural Center, and the director of the Kunstverein Wolfsburg, Germany. She curated numerous art and film exhibitions including Light & Noir: Exiles and Emigres in Hollywood, 1933–1950(2014) at the Skirball. At the Academy Museum, she co-curated Stories of Cinema(2021), Backdrop: An Invisible Art (2021), Regeneration: Black Cinema, 1898 – 1971 (2022); curated Isaac Julien: Baltimore (2022) and Cyberpunk: Envisioning Possible Futures Through Cinema (2024). She wrote the book Projected Art History: Biopics, Celebrity Culture, and the Popularizing of American Art (2014) and has published essays in books and journals. Berger earned a PhD in Art History from Braunschweig University of Art, Germany, and an MA in Romance Studies and Art History from the University of Vienna, Austria.

Samantha Culp is a writer, filmmaker, and cultural strategist based in Los Angeles after a decade in greater China. Her work is focused on the changing flows of global culture, the shifting creative economy, and mobilizing storytelling for social change. As a journalist and critic, her writing has appeared in publications such as Wired, The Atlantic, Art in America and MIT Technology Review. For Netflix, she produced the documentary series "The Confession Tapes" and "Exhibit A", focused on wrongful convictions and how they reveal America's flawed justice system. She is currently writing a nonfiction book for Crown Publishing, about the global history of "the future" as a cultural concept and its transformation into a commercial industry.

Nora N. Khan is an independent critic, essayist, curator, and educator based in Los Angeles, where she is currently Arts Council Professor at UCLA in Design Media Arts. Her writings on philosophy of AI and emerging technologies and the future of creative production in a technocratic age are referenced heavily across fields. Formally, this work attempts to theorize the limits of algorithmic knowledge and locate computation’s influence on critical language. Her books are AI Art and the Stakes for Art Criticism (2025), Seeing, Naming, Knowing (2019) and Fear Indexing the X-Files (2017), with Steven Warwick. She is a member of the Curatorial Ensemble of the 2026 edition of Counterpublic, one of the nation’s largest public civic exhibitions, focused next on ‘Near Futures’. She was the Co-Curator with Andrea Bellini of the Biennale de L’Image en Mouvement 2024, A Cosmic Movie Camera, hosted by Centre d'Art Contemporain Genève, and curated Manual Override at The Shed (2020). Khan was a longtime editor (2014-2021) at Rhizome, served as guest editor of HOLO, producing the well-received Mirror Stage; Between Computability and its Opposite (2021), and as Editor-in-Residence at Topical Cream. Khan was nominated for the John R. Frazier Award for Excellence in Teaching at Rhode Island School of Design, where she was a professor in Digital + Media from 2018 to 2021.

Namik Mackic is an artist, urbanist, cultural producer, and educator. His practice crosses disciplines and media in an exploration of one overaching theme: collapse and reordering of world systems, as discerned through the diasporic body and thought. He has led pioneering projects for Norwegian Ministries of Culture and Education focused on innovation in cultural and education policy, and taught research seminars and studios on regional urbanization, urban design, and landscape theory—as visiting faculty at RISD School of Architecture (2017), MIT School of Architecture + Planning (2018), and as Assistant Professor at The Oslo School of Architecture and Design (2018–2021). He studied music at Norwegian Academy of Music, philosophy at University of Oslo, and urban studies at Harvard Graduate School of Design. As Research Program Manager at SCI-Arc (2020–) he most recently organized Views of Planet City, SCI-Arc's contribution to PST ART: Art & Science Collide, presented by Getty.