Artefacts of the future, ethical echoes in medicine

Artefacts of the Future is a speculative exhibition that explores how emerging biomedical technologies may reshape care, agency, and the human body.

The exhibition presents marble- and clay-based works created with new 3D-printing technologies, appearing as fragments from a future archaeology—weathered, hybrid, and uncannily plausible. Each artefact embodies a speculative medical technology, accompanied by a guiding ethical question and a concise narrative. An amphora incorporating an artificial womb, for instance, examines how emerging reproductive technologies might reshape autonomy, responsibility, and the governance of life.

To deepen the experience, visitors are invited to converse with the artefacts through a bespoke large language model-powered interface that generates unique visual “fingerprints” of each exchange, cultivates open-ended reflection, and weaves individual encounters into a broader, shared deliberative landscape.

Framed within Greece’s mythological and sculptural heritage, the exhibition creates a hybrid environment—part museum, part ethical laboratory—and asks how we can cultivate moral awareness amid rapid innovation in biotechnology, AI, and health systems. Empowerment, in this vision, is not the pursuit of technological mastery, but the collective capacity to reflect, to question what is at stake, and to imagine futures shaped by ethical sensibility rather than technological momentum.

Developed through a multidisciplinary collaboration at ETH Zurich—uniting researchers in bioethics, artificial intelligence, 3D printing technologies, and biomedical innovation with artists—the project transforms complex ethical questions into sculptural form. The result bridges scientific expertise and artistic imagination to open new spaces for ethical reflection.