Marco Brambilla’s newest work to be on billboards in Times Square through June

The video work by artist Marco Brambilla, who’s known for his collaborations with NASA, Marina Abramović, Maison Margiela, and Kanye West. His new work will be on display for Times Square Arts’ Midnight Moment program in June the world’s largest and longest-running digital art exhibition. Every night in June from 11:57 pm to midnight, over 90  electronic billboards will project Brambilla’s reality-bending film, Approximations of Utopia, which uses AI and archival images from world fairs dating back to the 50s to create a vision of a futuristic, utopian world fair. 

About the work: Approximations of Utopia predicts the future world’s fair that will combine facets of the previous World Expositions which took place in New York, Brussels, Montreal, Osaka, Seville, and Shanghai. Coinciding with the Queens Museum’s celebration of the 60th anniversary of the 1964 World’s Fair, Brambilla’s work reimagines the World’s Fair in a distant age unbound by geography and conflict. His idealist visual society is no better displayed than in the middle of Times Square where visitors from all over the world can experience the utopian exposition. 

Brambilla’s work has been exhibited internationally at institutions such as The Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim Museum, and the Pérez Art Museum Miami. Most recently, his art was displayed on the Sphere in Las Vegas paying homage to the legacy of Elvis Presley. Engaging with virtual reality technologies, archival footage, and generative AI, Brambilla’s works immerse viewers in a metaverse that satirizes pop culture and challenges our very understanding of both the present and the future, reality and illusion.