The future, with all its unknowables, can cause us to dream or to feel anxiety.

These disparate reactions to the future are the central theme in the exhibition, The Possibility of Island, which opened Thursday at the Museum of Contemporary Art's Wynwood annex, MOCA at Goldman Warehouse.

The exhibition, curated by Ruba Katrib, an assistant curator for MOCA, was inspired by 2006's The Possibility of an Island, by French author Michel Houellebecq.

Katrib said the exhibition is not an attempt to illustrate the novel, nor do any of the works reference it.

Instead, the artists picked up on the themes addressed in the book: sexuality, everlasting life, death and destruction, among others.

In one work, New York artist Peter Coffin created an amorphous blob peppered with colored lights and attached to a corner of a gallery. To Your Scattered Bodies Go is eerily magnetic.

New York artist Julika Rudelius also has created a work that is hard to pull away from: the film, Forever, in which wealthy, older women discuss their lives, and in the process reveal their fears and anxieties about aging and beauty.

Miami artist Nicolas Lobo took perhaps the greatest leap in executing his work.

Lobo, who joined the Raelian Movement while working on the project, used three terrazzo tiles inlaid with what appear to be crop circles. The tiles are actually floor plans, the first physical manifestation of a future embassy for the Raelian Movement. Raelians believe humans were created by extraterrestrials who mastered cloning.

''I've been fascinated with them for a while,'' Lobo said of the Raelians.

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