injection of aesthetic codes and ideals, a familiar tactic to many in various campaigns, especially the ones with socio-political agenda. On the other hand, the script for both the Archivist and Ad Hominem is written by Verhaest in collaboration with GPT-3, an artificial intelligence that uses deep learning based on 67 billion books, wikipedia’s, and other various texts published on the internet to produce human-like texts. The text poetically connotes each utopian ideal with at times repeatingwords and sentences, vivid and tactile portrayal of the surreal symbols, and dreamlike associations of disparate events. Such uncanny Kafkaesque narration is heightened by the surreal exaggeration of the characters’ faces, contrasted against the stark, realistic depiction of the surrounding environment. The aesthetics can be considered thetrademark of the artist, visible from early on in her past works. And it is an approach that opens up for more creative and malleable navigation of constructed worlds, and for further variations and plural meanings. By interpreting the extreme views of the future in a delicate and beautiful cinematic language of variation, Verhaest reminds us that the departurepoint of utopia is the human imagination, and communicates the infinite possibilities that reality rather than the ideal can provide. Grounded in the domain of experimental film, Alex Verhaest has been invested in diverse forms of narratives and how they are propagated and informed by relevant social intricacies. One may primarily consider the new technology and its social impact as one of the artist’s main concerns from her innovative usage of interactive technologies in the past works such as the Temps Mort (2013) series; however, more so than the fascination with the novelty, Verhaest zooms in onwhat the various media are capable of containing and conveying, and what continues to live on and what gets left out in the convergence of different spaces and temporalities. Deeming the cinematic space as one of the most communicatively affective media, the artist uses it as a container, which can be continuously expanded and interrogated. As Sofie Verraest put it, “[s]eeing narrative as a universal practice,” theartist detects different media that are “culturally and historically variable.” Sofie Verraest’s thesis on the pattern of narratives was pertinent to this particular case of Alex Verhaest’s expanded cinema that span an installation and avideogame. Change, which Verhaest imposes as a singular constant, is functionally innate to any narrative, and it is also often instigated particularly for a socio-political scheme, just like the monolith to mark an ideological victory reminding the generations to come. But here in the Archive of Unattained Futures, just like the rotating portrait of Change depicted in the Island of the Day Before / the Island of the Day After, Verhaest is questioning if the socio-political agenda and itsformal manifestations have already become innate, and that it is a past form that one confuses with a futurist vision. The pandemic, which stirred up an indisputable “change” in humanity since early 2020, had unlocked yet again the extreme aspects of society, that are polarized collective idealisms either extremely negative or positive about the future. Through this exhibition, Verhaest posits that these oppositional ideologies not only repeat continuously throughout history but also perpetuate as aesthetical stereotypes in various genres of arts, and questions if these have not already dominated our subconscious. Moreover, in line with the artist’s ongoing investigation of methodologies and forms of narratives, traversing timeless classics and new technologies, Verhaest reviewshow we accept change, and if the imagination of the future triggered by change is actually futuristic, via a cyclical and complex flow of time that cannot be affixed in linear temporality.