The Automatic Society

“Have we not always had the deep-seated phantasy of a world that would go on without us? The poetic temptation to see the world in our absence, free of any human, all-too-human will?” —Jean Baudrillard, Why Hasn’t Everything Already Disappeared?

LABoral Centre for Art and Industrial Creation (Gijón, Spain) presents The Automatic Society, an international exhibition by asturian artist Félix Luque Sánchez, in collaboration with Iñigo Bilbao Lopategui, Damien Gernay and Vincent Evrard.

Industrial robots are designed to perform repetitive tasks with near-perfect precision. They operate without hesitation, exhaustion or loss of concentration. This is the mastery of automation, a synchronised symphony.

From taylorism to contemporary artificial intelligence, the utopia of automation has become increasingly prevalent. Having already transformed the world of industrial production, it has now taken hold of our thinking, judgement and memory.

This is the age of La Société Automatique (The Automatic Society), the title of a Bernard Stiegler lecture describing the total automation of our lives. All areas of existence are merging into an invisible network of computations; digital utilitarianism is supplanting human decisions, imposing efficiency-driven logic that reduces our scope for action. Technology is becoming the invisible architect of our lives. An already dystopian present, where education that critically engages with these opaque systems is key in securing the democratic reappropriation of technology.

The exhibition The Automatic Society, on view through October 17, 2026, depicts the anxiety of a post-anthropic world where humanity no longer occupies centre stage and machines—Sisyphuses devoid of weariness or rebellion—threaten to erase us. A universe of automatons carrying out their self-contained, cyclical work, with no human purpose.

The Automatic Society is a co-production by LABoral Art and Industrial Creation Centre, iMAL, Art Center for Digital Cultures & Technology, Europalia and the Wallonia-Brussels Federation.

Following its opening at iMAL, where it was on display until February 15, the exhibition is now at LABoral Centre for Art and Industrial Creation as the second venue for this international project.

Spatial design: Nel Verbeke / Graphic design: Lorena Poncela.