What Comes After No One? Future Artifacts for a Final Generation

As microplastic pollution intensifies, mounting evidence points to its serious risks to human health and well-being. But what if the most dire predictions about its impact on humanity became reality?

What Comes After No One? Future Artifacts for a Final Generation showcases emerging artists and designers from across the United States and abroad as they explore a speculative world where extreme microplastic pollution has made human procreation impossible. The featured works probe the aesthetic, material, psychological, and emotional consequences of living in the shadow of extinction. Confronting our collective impermanence through an interplay of art, design, creative technology, and speculative fiction, the artists examine what it means to create for a world where adaptation is both urgent and futile, and where human ingenuity collides with impending obsolescence.

By positioning design within a future where human existence is no longer assured, What Comes After No One? invites audiences to reflect on questions of responsibility, mourning, and meaning in an era of ecological collapse. The exhibition challenges the assumption that design must always aim for progress, posing a provocative question: What does creative work become when the designer’s role is no longer to envision a better future?

The international artists and designers exhibiting in What Comes After No One? are all graduates of the renowned Design and Technology Program at Parsons School of Design. In this, their first collective presentation, these practitioners—whose backgrounds span fine arts, spatial design, engineering, data science, and speculative design—merge their distinct perspectives into a shared exploration. Through this collaborative exhibition, they invite audiences to engage with urgent questions at the intersection of ecological collapse, technological innovation, and the uncertain future of human survival.

Featured artists and designers include:

• Franco Chen
• Leffin
• Emily Gary
• Rachel Gorman
• Myles House

What Comes After No One? Future Artifacts for a Final Generation will run May 15–16 at Studio Anselm Dastner, 618 E 9th St FRNT 1, New York, NY 10009.

Exhibit Hours:
Thursday, May 15: 5 PM – 10 PM (Opening Reception)
Friday, May 16: 11 AM – 10 PM

More information:
www.throughstudio.com/what-comes-after-no-one