In 2020, Villar Rojas and his team developed the Time Engine, a software system designed to explore the conditions of imagined worlds. Combining procedural modelling, simulations of environmental and material processes, and speculative models of economies, societies and conflict, the system terraforms detailed synthetic worlds. Across periods ranging from hours to millions of years, organisms, architecture, machines and geological matter are shaped by changing climates, systems of exchange, struggles over resources, and the emergence or collapse of civilisations. The artist develops the conditions within which these worlds evolve, drawing sculptural forms from the histories that unfold within them.
Earth generates forms of astonishing complexity: insects, trees, rocks, even the machines through which new forms come into being. Villar Rojas’s digital ecologies extend this generative logic into imagined worlds. The End of Imagination recasts the creative act: what might art look like when no single intelligence is its author, when form emerges from the innumerable forces of a world acting upon itself? The artist retrieves objects from these realities and gives them material presence in ours. As Villar Rojas says: ‘I model worlds, and these worlds model “sculptures” for me.’
Translating these digital forms into physical existence involves an extended process of research and fabrication. In a temporary workshop in Rosario, Argentina, the artist and his team developed materials, tools and construction techniques to reconcile the forms with terrestrial gravity, scale and structural stability. Concrete, glass, salt, wax, resin, plastics, wood, motor parts and organic matter are assembled in successive layers, producing surfaces that recall mineral formations, industrial residues and the remains of monuments. Their apparent age and unfamiliar anatomy emerge from the accumulated decisions and labour of the people who build them.
What happens when an institution built to interpret the past when the objects it holds come from histories that never happened? The sculptures have the physical weight and complexity of factual things, yet have no place in the chronology through which we make sense of the world. Here, the museum itself becomes both a setting for that inquiry and one of its subjects.
The End of Imagination belongs to a long history of human attempts to think beyond our limits. Gods, art and mathematics have allowed finite minds to conceive of realities they cannot directly experience. Yet every sculpture depends on human judgement, material knowledge and collective labour to come into being. At a moment when AI promises or threatens to automate creation, Villar Rojas makes the act of bringing something into the world insistently visible. Who imagines, who builds, and who determines the conditions of creation remain profoundly human questions.
‘I chose to step completely outside of the human timeline.’
Adrián Villar Rojas
