The title The Future Is So Bright You’ve Got to Wear Shades carries a subtle humor while critically reflecting on seemingly positive yet ultimately superficial visions of the future.
At the same time, it reveals a widespread optimism present in contemporary society, where real threats are often either treated as a pure spectacle, or unnoticed or consciously ignored.

The Sun: Source and Threat The image of the sun in the project serves a dual symbolic role.
Traditionally, the sun represents the source of life, energy, and growth on Earth. However, in the context of human-driven transformations of the planet—such as climate change and environmental degradation—the sun takes on a new, more ominous meaning. It becomes a symbol of apocalypse, reflecting the catastrophic consequences that arise when natural systems are destabilized by human activity.
This duality encapsulates the tension between life-giving forces and the looming threats to the planet’s future.

Future Visions
The project critically interrogates on one hand the widespread dissemination of superficially positive visions of the future, particularly those tied to technological progress, innovation discourse, and neoliberal development frameworks.
These visions often lack depth, failing to account for long-term ecological risks, socio-economic inequalities, and the epistemic blind spots built into current systems of forecasting and planning.
Rather than rejecting optimism outright, the work reflects on the function of optimism as a social and psychological construct.
It raises questions about the epistemological frameworks through which futures are imagined and legitimized: Who constructs these visions? What assumptions underpin them? And what is systematically excluded in the process?

Denial and Disengagement
The Future Is So Bright You’ve Got to Wear Shades on the other hand explores the psychological and sociopolitical mechanisms of denial in the face of systemic crisis.
Drawing on the aesthetics of optimism, the project critiques how dominant narratives about the future function as distractions—constructs that shield individuals and societies from confronting uncomfortable, yet urgent, realities.
At its core, the work examines the phenomenon of cognitive dissonance in late modernity: the growing gap between knowledge and action, perception and reality.
As in the satirical logic of the film Don’t Look Up, the project reflects on how warnings about existential threats—climate collapse, technological overreach, systemic instability—are either absorbed into spectacle or dismissed as incompatible with everyday life.

Hyperreality and Strategic Ignorance
Two parallel forms of disengagement are highlighted.
On one hand, those with access to knowledge often retreat into hyperreality: a space where abstract data, simulations, and mediated experience replace direct engagement, leading to a sense of helplessness or detachment.
On the other, those without access or interest in such knowledge maintain a form of strategic ignorance—a refusal to allow the weight of potential catastrophe to disrupt the routines and comforts of daily existence.

Wearing Shades – Protect and Avoid
The metaphor of "wearing shades" encapsulates this dual dynamic.
It is both a form of protection and avoidance—a filtering of perception that enables people to coexist with crisis without registering its full impact.
Optimism, in this context, is not simply naive; it is structurally produced, ideologically maintained, and psychologically necessary for the functioning of a society that cannot—or will not—change course.


How does society construct and promote stories of the future that, despite widespread acceptance, sharply contradict the realities revealed by scientific data and evidence?