Future Wunderkammer is a Future Humans project that reimagines the cabinet of curiosity for distant and possible futures.

Early modern cabinets of curiosity were sites where natural philosophers assembled unfamiliar specimens, artifacts, and technologies in order to study, classify, and ultimately define life itself. By collecting and categorizing these relics, wunderkammern shaped how knowledge was produced—drawing boundaries between species, and between the natural and the artificial. By arranging fossils of extinct creatures alongside fragments of the living, they also helped construct ideas of life’s history.

Future Wunderkammer extends this tradition forward. Bringing together speculative art, scientific research, and storytelling, the project presents relics from possible futures—imagined objects that are not predictions, but remnants of worlds that have not yet come to pass.

These relics ask what might life become? By encountering them, viewers are invited to reconsider how life is defined, valued, and lived on Earth now.

Future Wunderkammer is developed in collaboration with artists, scientists, philosophers, and writers, and unfolds across digital platforms, publications, performances, installations, and live events.

Contributors

Future Wunderkammer is developed in collaboration with artists, scientists, philosophers, and writers.

Simon Alexander-Adams
Felicity Amaya Schaeffer
Freddy Avis (Arswain)
Neda Atanasoski
Nancy Baker Cahill
Rosi Braidotti
Sougwen Chung
Theo Downes-Le Guin
David Gruber
Ken Liu
Giovanni Petri
Reeps 100
Niiyokamigaabaw Deondre Smiles
Wendi Yan

Origins of What Will Life Become?

What Will Life Become? began as a two-day workshop in April 2022, hosted in collaboration with the USC Dornsife Center on Science, Technology, and Public Life. The gathering brought together visionary scholars, scientists, and artists. Each offered visions about the profound transformations presently shaping the future of life.

Set in the iconic Bradbury Building, the workshop featured leading practitioners on the Futures of Life, Mind, and Outer Space. Insights from AI engineers, synthetic biologists, historians of science, astrobiologists, and philosophers generated ideas about what life will become.

Liam Young’s lecture-performance envisioned the future of cities through planetary and multispecies frameworks. The Berggruen Institute was proud to premiere three art commissions: Sougwen Chung painted with embodied machines, Nancy Baker Cahill debuted a multispecies AR sculpture, and REEPS100 demonstrated his AI-inflected voice backdropped by three new glittering Voice Gems. Workshop participants took part in futures exercises, writing a letter to the world in 2049.

In the Future Wunderkammer, you’ll explore how the Workshop’s initial discussions and creative explorations developed — and we invite you to take part in writing a letter to your future, too.

The Future Humans program aims to not only witness but inspire emerging forms of life—biological, technological, and hybrid—that are reshaping how we think about existence, creativity, and humanity’s place in the cosmos.