The exhibition project The Future Archive, opening June 2, 2012 and curated by Ute Meta Bauer, takes up artistic research projects developed in the 1970s and early 1980s at the Center for Advanced Visual Studies (CAVS) that inspired a current generation of cultural producers and their artistic production. The pioneering works of CAVS's directors György Kepes and Otto Piene and the early generation of CAVS's fellows were influenced by the German Bauhaus movement and post-war modernism. Their innovative and radical ideas, a part of the so-called "techno social" movement at MIT, serve as points of departure for present cultural and artistic production linked to CAVS and its successor, ACT. Project documentation of György Kepes (1906–2001), Otto Piene, Aldo Tambellini, Maryanne Amacher (1938–2009) and Muriel Cooper (1925–94) are displayed alongside recent project material by Olafur Eliasson, Florian Hecker, Amanda Moore, Luis Berrios Negron, Nader Tehrani / Urbonas Studio, and Markus Weisbeck.

Ute Meta Bauer is an associate professor and founding director of the Program in Art, Culture, and Technology at MIT's School of Architecture and Planning. Previously Bauer was professor and head of the Institute of Contemporary Art at the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna. She studied stage design and art at the HfbK Hamburg and, for more than two decades, has worked as a curator of exhibitions and presentations on contemporary art, film, video, and sound with a focus on transdisciplinary formats. Bauer was a cocurator of Documenta11 on the team of Okwui Enwezor, the artistic director of the 3rd Berlin Biennale, and she served as the founding d of the Office for Contemporary Art Norway (OCA). Bauer has edited numerous publications on contemporary art and artistic education.