One glimpse of the future will be on display and under discussion in Prague over the next week and a half as a result of an unusual joint venture between the august Czech Academy of Sciences and CIANT, a local organization that puts on events exploring the intersection between art and technology.

This one, titled TransGenesis, focuses on biotechnologies as part of the academy's annual Week of Science and Technology. CIANT curator Pavel Sedlák says visitors will "freely move between scientific laboratories and artists' studios to see how the same technology is used across very different disciplines." This reflects the core idea of transgenesis, which Sedlák calls "the process of integrating into a living organism a foreign gene from a different species, which gives the organism a new property."

Some festival highlights appear to break unspoken rules. "Many of the artworks transcend the borders between living and nonliving, between human and nonhuman," Sedlák says.

What exactly are the offspring of these couplings? One project includes an installation created entirely of living mice, depicting "future furniture ... or a very meditative and almost hypnotic mandala." In another, live tissues form a sculpture medium.

An Austrian project has people interacting with plants that grow in a virtual world and respond to touch. Lilith generates movies that mirror your brain state but also try to alter it. The Male Pregnancy Project comes from an artist who runs a Web site where people design children for real delivery through surrogate mothers. Another project promises a fish in an aquarium in Paris communicating with an audience in Prague.

This might not sound like the future you imagined — just the point, says Sedlák: familiarizing people with the possibilities of technology so they don't live in fear of them.

"People are always afraid of what they do not have a chance to see and touch. The artistic projects that we will show are trying to help people overcome this fear and really experience some of these new freaks, so they can have an intelligent dialogue about the new technologies."

But such dialogues are not the most important thing that Sedlák and his group hope the festival will produce. "What is really important is to learn how to communicate and translate, not only between very different disciplines but also between people," he says. "This is true not only about the relations between different cultures and nations, but also between different species and even between the organic and nonorganic. Such communication involves not only empathy, but a certain generosity and openness that does not feel threatened by every new entity or being that is trying to become a part of our world."

Sedlák sounds like an interplanetary diplomat expounding on his cross-cultural vision of the future. "Either we want to live in a fascist, closed world that is open only for a certain class of being, or we want to live in an open and democratic society that has the ability to evolve and change," he says. "That is not only a social, but a very basic biological property of all complex organisms."

The future doesn't always turn out as planned. But after this one-of-a-kind art project, you'll be inspired to make some plans of your own.