Dreams of Analog Machines

Louis Morlæ embraces the friction generated by the extremes of contemporary life. Although his work is facilitated by technology, it is decidedly object-based, aesthetically akin to products but resistant to commercialization.

Encompassing moving images and sculpture, his practice could be described as a speculative imaginary manifested by high-spec software — CAD (computer-aided design), 3D printing, game engines, AI generators — that was originally intended for industrial and commercial product design. While slick, the outcome is less aligned with the impenetrable container of the iPhone, and more with the bizarre yet captivating power of the Labubu. 

To encounter Morlæ’s work is to enter into a theatrical uncanny, each piece functioning as a character drawing our attention to the accumulated traces of technology that surround us. 

Morlæ’s speculative worldbuilding is fueled by his preoccupation with how such technologies bleed into our everyday lives as their domestication accelerates, entangled with his vivid imagination. As recent science fiction becomes our present reality, he grapples with the outer limits of humanity’s possible futures in irreverent ways, adopting what he has termed a “tinfoil hat perspective.”

The central feature of Morlæ’s exhibition “$ID3FA££ $YNDR0M3 [Sidefall Syndrome]” (2025) at Rose Easton gallery earlier this year was SFB1 (2025), a floor-mounted system of air ducts, insulated with precisely executed corrugated cardboard, and connected to three powder blue airbags of varying sizes. 

SFB1 is a relic of a future so untethered from pragmatic reality that rules such as gravity no longer apply. A bombastic contraption, it comes across like a safety feature for a tilting reality, designed to catch those in freefall. 

The overall effect is a cartoonish retrofuturism, its airbags inflating and deflating dramatically at regular intervals, accompanied by cacophony. The result is an experience of performative sadness, as though the work is aware of its own gimmicky non-function. In this way, Morlæ positions himself as an escapist prepper, projecting the spectator into a future where automated technology isn’t merely a tool or enabler, but a savior. As an artwork, the piece is both perfectly rendered and wildly impolite, spatially cumbersome and not clearly collectible. 

It was Easton’s first show with Morlæ, “Machinochrome Dreams” (2022), while he was still a student at the Royal Academy that inspired her to work with him long-term and to transition from a project space to a commercial gallery. Recognizing Morlæ’s potential as the cornerstone of a holistic roster, both artist and Easton herself acknowledge the “institutional” nature of Morlæ’s practice, garnering exhibition appearances and accolades, rather than sales.       

Morlæ’s works tally with Sianne Ngai’s definition of cute as a “minor” consumer aesthetic, their soft approachability contributing to a “slackening of the tension” between consumer product and art object.¹ 

Rather than terrifying his viewer with hard-edged dystopian visions and unknowable but pervasive technologies, Morlæ offers an open-armed welcome to travel with him into a not so distant future. 

Morlæ’s recent show, “Aut-OOO-Arcadia” (2025), curated by Somerset House Studios and Anne Duffau, offered a tactile and essentially analog vision of a world underpinned by automation. The emoji aesthetic of Mother (2024) invites the viewer into a dialogue via a chatbot feature and fisheye surveillance loop. While As I wait in the fields for you and Will the corn be growing tonight (both works 2024) present fuzzy and friendly — if a little creepy — visions of automated anthropomorphism through their motion trackers and AI narrator. 

These works are not so much confrontations with animatronics and artificial intelligence as thought experiments about a future where these technologies are inevitable. 

In a shambolic political and cultural moment, Morlæ’s practice represents a vital exercise in agency. Fueled by general discomfort as well as a belief in art as a space for optimistic dissent, he uses the real technologies to which he has access to speculate on futures full of potential. 

Joining the ranks of artists such as Suzanne Treister, Nina Davies, and Christopher Kulendran Thomas, Morlæ builds fanciful but not wholly far-fetched narratives through the prism of technology, while anchoring his experiences in the tactility of traditional art-making. If algorithmic futures increasingly inscribe the present, his practice reveals the speed at which technology outpaces our imaginations, and asks audiences to imagine harder.