Anthropology of the Image and Collective Futures

What changes when images are no longer encountered through analog touch, but through digital interface?

An open-door diegetic installation blending contemporary visual art with speculative participatory inquiry. Step into the space at any time to encounter the work, interface with the environment, and directly co-create the collective futures on display.

Using the archaeological layers of Rome’s street posters as a looking glass, this forum invites participants to explore how the transition from tactile image cultures to digital ones reshapes how we encounter, remember, and inhabit images—and, in turn, our relationships to memory, place, and one another. Whether personal or commercial, images are a lens through which we peel back the anthropology of our own society and better imagine the collective futures already taking shape.  

Justin T. Walsh creates work at the intersection of vulnerability, failure, humor, nature and cultural critique. Moving between photography, video, sculpture, ceramics, and performance, his practice operates as a form of neo-anthropology and internal excavation—an ongoing effort to understand how humans construct meaning, identity, and intimacy through fragile gestures, absurd attempts at control, and a rapidly divergent shift from our natural evolution in favor of the augmented spaces we create. 

As Diegetic Curator for Oria Futures, he translates the abstract boundaries of radical imagination into tangible, sensory realities, orchestrating immersive experiences that allow us to physically inhabit and shape collective tomorrows.

Oria Futures is an innovative startup and benefit company dedicated to research and development of new methodologies and technologies in the field of collective foresight.