LAST HUMAN #003

This is the third installment in our series of open prototyping zines for LAST HUMAN - a 10,000-square-foot immersive horror experience premiering at MAD Arts in 2026. With each issue, we invite you deeper into the messy, modular, and often haunted process of building hybrid worlds at the intersection of narrative, play, and emerging technology.

Last Human in the Classroom

Last Human began not in a gallery, but in a classroom. Emerging from the Columbia Digital Storytelling Lab, the project is developed through a series of participatory workshops that blend art, design, and code in a pedagogy of prototyping possibilities - a process that values iteration, collaboration, and reflection over perfection. Each prototype becomes both a research method and a performance, revealing how learning itself can be an act of worldbuilding.

This approach draws inspiration from Fluxus, the radical 1960s art movement that blurred the boundaries between art, life, and instruction. Fluxus traces its roots to John Cage’s experimental composition class at The New School, where artists like George Brecht, Allan Kaprow, and Dick Higgins began transforming everyday gestures into performance scores. These classes became laboratories of possibility - spaces where art was not a finished object but an invitation to act.

In the same spirit, Last Human treats the classroom as a living score. Students co-create haunted interfaces, masks, and browser rituals that question the boundaries between human and machine. They build prototypes that are ephemeral yet alive, communal yet uncanny - performances of learning that echo Fluxus’s call to make art inseparable from life. What emerges is a participatory pedagogy for the algorithmic age: part workshop, part haunting, part collective exorcism.

Why a Zine?

Because what we’re building is alive. It’s glitching, evolving, and filled with uncertainty. This zine is our lab notebook, our manifesto, and our ghost story. It captures the behind-the-scenes mechanics of storytelling in a collapsing digital world—where identity is fluid, interfaces betray us, and collective punishment feels algorithmic.

Proceeds from zine and collectible sales directly support the installation of LAST HUMAN.

About

The Last Human Collective is a hybrid team of artists, designers, technologists, and researchers investigating what it means to remain human in an increasingly synthetic world. Through immersive installations, browser-based rituals, and participatory horror, we aim to expose and challenge the fractured realities of our time. Our work is a call for agency, critical literacy, and new forms of communal resistance.