Abandoned Future
Introduction
Abandoned Future (2025) is a generative AI artwork that reflects on Uruguay’s complex relationship with industrialization during the mid-20th century, particularly under the influence of Luis Batlle Berres. His presidency (1947–1951, 1955–1956) marked a period of ambitious state-led industrialization, aimed at transforming Uruguay from an agricultural exporter into a diversified, self-sufficient economy through import substitution industrialization (ISI). While the era brought economic modernization and social progress, it also laid the groundwork for future challenges — economic stagnation, inefficiencies, and ultimately, the decline of many state-supported industries.
This series of six generative AI-created images explores the tension between progress and abandonment, capturing the remnants of Uruguay’s industrial dreams. The AI draws on historical references to Uruguay’s industrial architecture and visual motifs of the ISI era — crumbling concrete, rusting steel, and overgrown vegetation — to evoke a haunting sense of unrealized potential and forgotten ambition.
The Artwork
The collection consists of six large-format digital prints, each portraying a different fictionalized abandoned factory. The AI-generated images blend hyper-realistic textures with subtle distortions, creating an uncanny and dreamlike atmosphere. Each piece captures the emotional weight of industrial decline while preserving echoes of the past.
Abandoned Future reflects the rise and fall of Uruguay’s mid-century industrial ambitions. By using generative AI, the artist allows the algorithm to “imagine” an alternative history — fictional yet grounded in the visual and emotional language of Uruguay’s industrial past. The blending of realistic detail and algorithmic distortion creates a dreamlike quality, suggesting that the industrial age remains suspended in Uruguay’s cultural memory.
The series invites viewers to consider the cost of progress and the fragility of development within a capitalistic context. Through AI-generated decay and beauty, Abandoned Future confronts the legacy of Luis Batlle Berres’s vision — an industrial dream that was both transformative and, ultimately, unsustainable.
