Borrowing its title from the Millennium Dome promotional slogan, Imagine What We Can Do Tomorrow is an immersive presentation that relives and reimagines the dawn of the 21st century. The show comprises digital collage works that have been developed around a found footage video piece titled Y2K, made in collaboration with artist Nick Smith. The gallery walls are covered in aluminium foil, blocking electromagnetic waves and rendering the room a no-signal, Wifi-free zone, also known as a Faraday Cage.

Imagine What We Can Do Tomorrow takes the audience back to a seminal moment of global collective anxiety: New Year’s Eve, 1999. As the world moved towards the turn of the millennium there was increasing speculation that computer systems' inability to distinguish dates correctly beyond 1999 had the potential to bring down worldwide digital infrastructure, leading to the collapse of the finance, telecommunications and other industries—a fear that turned out to be unfounded.

Poulton speculates what kind of world we might be inhabiting now if the so-called “Millennium Bug” had indeed brought down worldwide computer systems. He draws parallels with contemporary anxieties around artificial intelligence and our increasingly hybridised digital-physical existences. In the collaged works, Poulton mines his own family archive and scans from books found in charity shops, alongside images downloaded from the deep internet, redacting and remixing to channel some of the chaotic energy and uncertainty of this time.

Poulton identifies the year 2000 as marking the fracturing of an era of hopeful naivety and optimism, that would be truly shattered by 9/11. The year also saw the first social media platforms emerge, as well as a new kind of voyeuristic reality television. The digital collages bear witness to the mental and physical toll taken on a generation that has grown up in the wake of Y2K, grappling with anxiety, insomnia, apathy and confusion. The collaboratively-produced film work explores this further, combining home video recordings, news clips, TV adverts and early internet ephemera into a video essay in two halves: pre- and post-Millennium, complete with its own New Year’s Eve countdown composed from timestamped house party camcorder footage. The film playfully explores the artists’ shared interest in the Millennium as a significant cultural landmark and turning point – one that marked simultaneously the beginning, and the end, of “the future”.