The rise of virtual reality games, films and social experiences in recent years has been accompanied by the promise of simulating utopian futures. The visions they conjure include limitless options for opening, exploring, and expanding new worlds. However, these tropes reproduce settler-colonial attitudes to space, time, and civilizational progress. They project the militarized and consumerist roles of neoliberal western societies into the future, while hiding their negative effects across past and present environments. In this article, I ask whether virtual worlds can be used to connect users with reparative futures. Looking at artworks by Colombian artist Ana María Millán and Chinese artist Cao Fei, I discuss how they intervene into existing virtual landscapes and aesthetics to question their modes of co-creation. I argue that they combine recontextualization, roleplay and rehearsal as forms of reparative practice. They resist narratives of exceptional authorship and agency in favor of pluralized approaches to the future. Rather than supporting the gamified erasure of existing worlds, these works hold space for loss, memory, and survival. By redistributing responsibility for harm from below and imaginations beyond the horizon of dominant visibility, these practices approach reparative futures.
Simulations, scenarios, and projections have played an important role in future studies since the origin of the discipline. The emergence of new technologies has come with the promise of more elaborate modes of forecasting, as well as fears about changes to dominant society. As Sardar has argued, futurists’ dominant approach to new technologies post-World War II was to predict and shape a future in which the status quo of Western control over non-Western nations was maintained (Sardar, 1993: 180–181). Within this paradigm, modernist future studies present the global crisis connected to the Western economics of growth as resolvable by new Western technologies “[…] concerned with solving all problems of domination, control and human relationships […]” (Sardar, 1993: 181). After colonizing the land of other peoples through their notion of borders and property and colonizing the past through their notion of history and reality, the West threatens to colonize the future through modernist notions of projection and simulation.