---
title: "Cabinet of retrofuturist curiosities"
slug: cabinet-retrofuturist
type: project
kicker: "project № 04 · 2024–2025 · lead"
accent: ochre
pills:
  - closed
  - 2024–2025
  - Botnar / QUB / CCCluj
  - €8,000
  - lead
role: "lead"
order: 4
summary: "Twelve objects designed with Midjourney, 3D-printed and finished by hand."
---

April 2024 to February 2025. Botnar Foundation through QUB, inside the CCCluj STEM initiative. €8,000. Twelve 3D-printed objects, designed with Midjourney, finished by hand.

## what it was

An educational workshop with middle- and high-school pupils, organised around a question: if you were the archivist of a distant future, what objects would you collect? The cabinet of curiosities, as a pre-modern form of museum, became the occasion for reflecting on what we consider worth preserving.

We built nine thematic courses exploring retrofuturism, classical cabinets of curiosities, historical futurism, cyberpunk, and solarpunk. Pupils used those courses to design fictional objects for a distant future. Lucian Rafan-Szekely turned their sketches into 3D models, printed them, and personalised them. The result: a retrofuturist cabinet of twelve prototypes.

## why it mattered

Three reasons.

First, **didactic**: we used Midjourney in an educational context without making a fetish of the technology. Generating AI images was just one step, not the destination. The road from idea → AI sketch → 3D model → printed object → hand-finished object is a pedagogy of *translation*: the same idea takes four different forms, and each form changes it.

Second, **philosophical**: working with retrofuturism, solarpunk, and cyberpunk gives pupils a vocabulary for talking about the future, instead of receiving it passively. That is a civic skill, not just an artistic one.

Third, **organisational**: this was a small project by budget (€8,000) and a large one in ambition. It confirmed that we can run initiatives that combine education, art, and technology without one suffocating the others.

## what we did

- Nine thematic courses (retrofuturism, cabinets of curiosities, futurism, cyberpunk, solarpunk and variations).
- Sessions with high-school and middle-school pupils.
- Twelve fictional objects designed with Midjourney.
- 3D modelling and printing with Lucian Rafan-Szekely.
- Hand finishing (assembly, painting, detailing) with the pupils.
- A final exhibition of the cabinet.

## what we learned

That **AI as a tool for thinking** is very different from AI as a solution. When we asked the pupils to use Midjourney to generate objects from the future, the first results were banal and sci-fi-cliché, copies of pop culture. The valuable work happened on the third or fourth iteration, when the pupils began to **interrogate** what the machine returned to them, to negotiate with it, to ask it for what it had not thought of.

This, for us, is what critical technology means: not refusing technology, but *negotiating* with it, with neither side getting the last word.

## numbers

- **Budget:** €8,000
- **Duration:** about 10 months
- **Objects produced:** 12
- **Courses:** 9 thematic
- **Partners:** Lucian Rafan-Szekely (3D designer), CCCluj (host), QUB (Botnar intermediary)

## materials

- The 12 3D-printed objects, exhibited.
- The original Midjourney sketches.
- Course documentation.

## read alongside

- [democraicy](project-democraicy) (2020): the root of our questions about AI.
- [AI4NGOs](project-ai4ngos) (2025): the continuation in workshop form, on AI in civil society.
- [Goana după meteor](project-goana-dupa-meteor) (2025): another interdisciplinary project.
- [Manifesto: critical technology; curiosity and experiment](manifesto)