Finding the future to be incompatible with human physiology, engineers at Amazon once invented a device to ensure that people wouldn’t become an impediment to technological progress. Issued on March 8, 2016, US Patent No. 9,280,157 granted the company the exclusive right to transport personnel within an active workspace by enclosing people in a lockable cage. Just large enough to confine an individual worker, the metal cell was intended to provide physical protection from the crush of robotic automation. Wheeled movement was to be controlled by management.

After word got out, and a Business Insider reporter came calling, Amazon’s senior vice president of operations tweeted that “even bad ideas get submitted for patents.” Amazon never built the apparatus. Instead the task was taken up by an artist named Simon Denny, who fabricated it with complete fidelity to the patent claims, even capturing the drawings’ strangely distorted perspective.

Denny’s Amazon Worker Cage is one of hundreds of artworks now on view at the newly-reopened New Museum, featured in a vast exhibition ambitiously titled New Humans: Memories of the Future. The inclusion of Denny’s work, which effectively embodies the negative space surrounding humanity in time that seems to have little need for human brains or bodies, exemplifies the expansiveness with which the New Museum curators have attempted to explore their subject.

The exhibition includes historical works such as prints and paintings by Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia provocatively representing women as machinery, as well as sculptures by H.C. Westermann and Nam June Paik playfully converting everyday objects into anthropomorphic robots. Contemporary artists take up where their forebears left off. For instance, Jenna Sutela’s HMO Nutrix is a fountain pumping artificial breast milk. Intermixed are artistic propositions, past and present, predicting or critiquing technological futures ranging from computer-generated art to abandonment of planet Earth.

Drawing on this compendium of material, numerous themes can be explored and theses advanced. For the curator Massimiliano Gioni, one significant preoccupation is “a symmetry between the first few decades of the twentieth century and the first quarter of this one”, especially “the troubling parallels between the rise of totalitarian regimes in that earlier period and the current spread of modern forms of fascism”. At least as mesmerizing, at least for me, is the question of what it means to be human in a world ever more densely populated by machines. Much has been said about this in terms of how the human mind relates to AI. Less frequently asked is the question of what becomes of the human body.

As Denny’s work makes clear, Amazon has ideas. If the body can be enclosed, it probably can be disposed. At the very least, the cage proclaims the inadequacies of the flesh and blood inside, which can survive only in conditions where the human has been mechanized.

Like Gioni, I see value in historical parallels, and not only in politics but also technology. The idea that people come to resemble the machines they invent is already evident in the paintings Duchamp and Picabia made in the second decade of the 20^th century, as the Industrial Revolution was domesticated and automation became an everyday reality. Duchamp’s Bride – painted in 1912 and represented in the New Museum exhibition with a 1937 reproduction – presents wifehood as a state of being that can be realized with a kit of parts that might equally well be used to build a home appliance. Man Ray takes the concept even further with a photograph of an eggbeater titled Woman. In each of these works – and even more overtly in Agnes Denes’s feminist riposte from 1969-70, a schematic of a fanciful engine titled Liberated Sex Machine – the proposition of mechanical replacement suggests that machines and women are no longer noticeably different from a male perspective. What to make of this confusion is left to the viewer.

The New Museum exhibition shows that the problem of being human has equally been a theatrical preoccupation.

In 1920-21, the Russian avant-garde artist El Lissitzky drew the “New Man”. The figure he depicted was intended to appear in Victory Over the Sun, a Russian Futurist opera in which the Sun is triumphantly replaced with an artificial light. The New Man is a miracle of engineering, apparently constructed from steel girders endowed with balletic flexibility. Born in a time and place of unadulterated optimism, this hybrid figure of masculinity was a template of superhuman possibility, which Lissitzky imagined would be even more compelling when the drawing was instantiated as an artificial performer. The New Man was designed to be a machine. In the thrall of Soviet Communism, ordinary people were expected to redesign themselves in an equivalent way.

Although Lissitzky’s drawings were never realized, a contemporaneous experiment at the German Bauhaus was successfully brought to stage, further dramatizing what humans might become. Oskar Schlemmer’s Triadic Ballet put human dancers in costumes that restricted their movements more firmly than any choreography. The prima ballerina was burdened with a heavy wooden tutu that made her as rigid as a gyroscope. The men who accompanied her were reduced in some cases to geometric shapes, simple humanoid forms wrought in modern materials such as sheet metal and rubber. As Schlemmer later proclaimed in The Theater of Bauhaus, “the boldest fantasies” could be achieved through “the new potentials of technology”. His spectacularly strange Triadic Ballet provided evidence, but also revealed an incompatibility between mechanical contraptions and human bodies through the awkwardness of mechanically actuated dance.

The Triadic Ballet is represented in the New Museum exhibition with a film recording a 1970 performance. By 1970, the costumes didn’t appear especially high-tech, and they certainly don’t today, any more than Duchamp’s Bride or Lissitzky’s New Man resemble products of Silicon Valley. Why, then, do these artworks remain salient in the present moment, visions to orient us within the tumult of technological disembodiment?

Art has the power to call possible futures into being, sometimes as enticement, often as warning. The potential of art to shape action is typically realized through its action on the imagination, in contrast to the imprisoning cage invented by Amazon.

This might be construed as a weakness. In reality, it’s a strength because the imagination is futureproof. Unlike a patent, art never expires.