Whose Future?
FUTURES installed in the Smithsonian Arts and Industries Building. (image: courtesy of the Smithsonian Institute and Rockwell Group.).
The future seems more volatile than ever in our mid-COVID world. Since the pandemic hit the UK, where I live, constant changes in governmental messaging have made it difficult to plan ahead. Should we organise that family gathering during the holidays or not? Can we continue to transition back to in-person teaching? Will I still have a job in six months’ time? Now, after more than two years of uncertainty, of constantly rearranging plans, trying to maintain hope and optimism for the future has, at least for me, been difficult.
Amidst such pessimism, a much-needed positive outlook is precisely what the FUTURES exhibition at Washington DC’s Smithsonian’s Arts and Industries Building (AIB) promises. Organised to celebrate the Smithsonian Institution’s 175th anniversary, and co-curated by a team of four – Monica Montgomery (former programmes and social justice curator), Ashley Molese (curator), Glenn Adamson (consulting curator), and Brad MacDonald (AIB director of creative media) – FUTURES showcases “more than 150 awe-inspiring objects, ideas, prototypes and installations that fuse art, technology, design and history to help visitors imagine many possible futures on the horizon”.
To accomplish its goal, the exhibition mostly adopts an optimistic tone. “It would be too easy to do the Black Mirror version of this show,” notes Rachel Goslins, director of the AIB. “We already have so much help imagining what can go wrong in the future: from science fiction, to media, to pundits. That gets the news, and the attention. And it is an important conversation, but we don’t have nearly as much help imagining what could actually go right, and this is equally important. We, therefore, set out to build an exhibition that helps people craft a vision of the future they want, not of the future they fear.”
A gesture-controlled FUTURES Beacon display developed by LAB at Rockwell Group.
This invitation for visitors to become active and autonomous participants in charting their own course to the future is mirrored in FUTURES’s exhibition design, produced by New York’s Rockwell Group. The exhibition has been divided into four main parts – Past Futures; Futures that Unite; Futures that Inspire; and Futures that Work – and, rather than delineating one set route through the space, the architecture firm has constructed a series of free-standing structures that help to open up circulation paths for visitors. Once you have passed through Past Futures, the show’s opening, the exhibition journey becomes non-linear, with exhibition goers invited to investigate the installations and objects on display in an order of their choosing. “We really thought about it in relation to choreography,” notes studio principal David Rockwell. “We wanted to create this choreography through the building like a dance. Guests are going to create their own path and I do think that what they take away might be different each time depending on how you move through [the exhibition].”
Rockwell Group’s approach to exhibition design was as much influenced by necessity as it was intention. The constraints of working with a historical building like the AIB meant that several parts of the space had to remain untouched. As Goslins observed to Metropolis magazine, the AIB exemplifies a “strong 19th-century personality”, with around 984 windows, grand, high arches, and a terrazzo floor constructed of prehistoric granite that contains fossils which are tens of millions of years old. It was not possible, therefore, to drill into floors, nor could much be attached or hung from the AIB’s walls or ceiling. Further complicating matters, Rockwell adds that “the building is not humidity controlled either”. These restrictions led to the architecture firm devising a pop-up format for FUTURES. “We had to try and create something that would be future-oriented and if the future is flexible, we had to be very flexible.”
“Whose futures are being represented in museum exhibitions about the future? How are these futures framed? And who or what gets erased in the process?”
Yet while working in or for a long-standing institution such as the AIB can influence the physical shape an exhibition takes, it can also impact curatorial intention and strategy. One of the research starting points for the co-curators of FUTURES, for example, was the Smithsonian’s object collections, a collection that – like many of its kind – is implicated in 19th-century histories and the continuing legacies of imperialism. Questions may be asked of the limitations, as well as the possibilities, of futures thinking as conceptualised from a museum context: how can curators avoid perpetuating dominant narratives through futures discourse? Additionally, whose futures are being represented in museum exhibitions about the future? How are these futures framed? And who or what gets erased in the process?
Curating (Designed) Futures
In assessing FUTURES, I should make a confession: I myself recently worked on a design exhibition about the future. At the time, I was part of a curatorial team attached to the now-dissolved Design, Architecture and Digital department (DADD) at the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) in London. Called The Future Starts Here (2018), this exhibition had a similar remit to the Smithsonian show – at least on a macro level. Like FUTURES, The Future Starts Here “brought together more than 100 objects as a landscape of possibilities for the near future” and its scope was, admittedly, broad. We displayed everything from wearable technology and smart home appliances, to projects that introduced unconventional ways of practising politics, designs for internet connectivity, space travel, and concepts about living forever. The main premise of this show, however, was to tease out both the intended and unintended consequences of designed objects, an idea influenced by the work of philosopher Paul Virilio, whose 1999 book Politics of the Very Worst observes that “[when] you invent the ship, you also invent the shipwreck.” Objects contain many possibilities and probabilities: good, bad and everything in between. The shape of the future depends on how we wield them.
Futures that Work in the West Hall of the Arts and Industries Building.
Both The Future Starts Here and FUTURES wrestle with the question of exactly whose future is being imagined. As Goslins noted during the FUTURES press view, the AIB’s curatorial team were aiming to present a landscape of futures: possibilities, rather than concrete predictions. “As many exercises in predicative future-making have taught us, it is folly to try and predict the future,” she said. “We get things wrong, we miss consequences, we inadequately account for disparate impact. More importantly, attempting to predict the future diminishes the very important variability therein. There is no one future. There are many possible futures, and which one we end up in very much depends on our individual and collective decisions.”
The Future Starts Here was framed in a similar manner. Drawing on critical design studio Dunne and Raby’s PPPP, a diagram that extrapolates from the present to consider multiple future scenarios, our aim as a curatorial team was to explore the potential futures that objects made today contain. A parallel aim was to illustrate that agency lies not with the designer or creator of the objects on display, but instead with their users. These directions were summarised in an introductory text, which noted that “[the] undeniable physical reality of these objects may give the impression that the future is already fixed. But new things contain unpredictable potentials and possibilities, often unanticipated even by their creators. It is up to us – as individuals, as citizens and even as a species – to determine what happens next. While the objects here suggest a certain future, it is not yet determined. The future we get is up to us.”
Our approach to futures thinking within DADD was informed by the past, as well as the present. Some of the conceptual thinking that anchored The Future Starts Here, for example, was derived by my co-curators from the V&A’s links to the very first World’s Fair: The Great Exhibition of 1851. Underpinned by colonial-imperial imperatives, The Great Exhibition was the first international showcase of modern industrial design and of inventions from across the world – exhibits that would, in turn, come to form some of the V&A’s first collections. Held at the Crystal Palace in Hyde Park, London, the exhibition was a grand spectacle, where decorative arts were promoted alongside new technologies, and even raw materials. This transdisciplinary approach to display would inspire my colleagues to seek out contemporary objects from wide-ranging fields, including art, design, science and technology, in order to examine the networked conditions of present-day global production. It was thinking that was eventually reflected back to V&A visitors as a new landscape of dynamic emerging futures.
FUTURES is, likewise, influenced by its host institution’s past, specifically the AIB’s connection to the 1876 World’s Fair. Held in Philadelphia, this was the first World’s Fair to be staged in the US and its success helped to fund a new museum called the United States National Museum in Washington DC, now the AIB. “World’s fairs have always been a part of the DNA of the Arts and Industries Building,” says Goslins. “When we started thinking about FUTURES we talked often about the particular magic of world’s fairs in popular imagination, the way they had their finger on the pulse of the most important people and ideas that were going to shape the next century, the way they inspired excitement and hopefulness about the future, the way they brought people together for shared experiences. They were the place to be.”
“There are many possible futures, and which one we end up in very much depends on our individual and collective decisions.”
Rockwell echoes these sentiments. Drawing on his own visit to the 1964 New York World’s Fair, he adds that these events are “the biggest, widest look into what things are going to propel us forward, and the possibilities that they present are just fascinating”. Conversely, as Goslins warns, world’s fairs were “also problematic in many ways, including how they treated marginalised groups and a somewhat blind faith in techno-optimism. We like to think about FUTURES as a contemporary world’s fair of ideas, updated for the world we are living in now.
Nevertheless, lingering techno-utopian beliefs (i.e. the proposition that new technologies alone can provide effective solutions to world problems) still seem to inform many futuristic visions. Walking through FUTURES, for example, it is easy to spot projects similar to those we had either researched or shown at the V&A. Soft exo-suits, robot assistants, 3D-printed solutions, and zero-waste, solar panellined floating cities. A superficial sweep of the AIB’s show gives the impression that futures, as interpreted from Euro-American contexts, are somewhat standard – ubiquitous even. Fancy robots, flying vehicles and frontier (or high) technologies – these are the kinds of objects that, at least in my curatorial experience, are expected of an exhibition about the future.
A Citizen Science education space in the Futures that Unite portion of the exhibition.
As Goslins and Rockwell observe, events like the world’s fairs, alongside the Industrial Revolution, placed technological and economic advancement firmly at the centre of human progress. Technological development has been used as a measure of “progress” ever since. The Second Industrial Revolution brought us electric power and mass production from the late 19th century; the Third Industrial Revolution of the late 20th century, with its advancements in computing and the creation of the internet(s), signalled a digital revolution; while new breakthroughs in fields such as artificial intelligence and biotechnologies have now led governments and experts to declare our arrival at the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Despite recent scrutiny over the contemporary role of technologies, including the impact of digital technology on 21st-century democracies, it is easy to see why the narrative of “technology as progress” may continue to pervade popular human imagination. These are ideas that curators of futures exhibitions can, perhaps, never wholly displace or disregard.
Something may also be said regarding spectacle, particularly for shows that tend to privilege objectbased displays. When selecting artefacts for The Future Starts Here, one of the main criteria against which objects were assessed was their aesthetic impact. A range of “star objects” – visually-striking, often interactive or working pieces, which were usually larger in scale – were prioritised, such as artist Tomás Saraceno’s floating sculpture Aerocene or Meta’s solar-powered Aquila drone. Harking back to the V&A’s history as a repository of “good design”, anchoring the exhibition with eye-catching objects devised by named creators was one method through which the “design” angle of the show could be amplified.[1] Objects that look good on display and in marketing campaigns also capture audiences’ imagination, helping to increase footfall.
On the other hand, it is through the pursuit of spectacle that certain projects are privileged by curators over others, a process that I was reminded of in FUTURES when viewing Oceanix, a zero-waste floating city envisioned by Bjarke Ingels Group. While zooming in on the project’s sleek architectural model, I thought back to my childhood in southeast Asia and my encounters with the region’s floating villages, inhabited by communities who have demonstrated sustainable living practices for some time, utilising a range of high-tech and lower-tech solutions. Why do we tend to omit these longstanding examples in our exhibitions about the future? Would displayed representations of these cases come across as too ethnographic? Is it easier as a curator and/or more impressive to instead showcase an architect-designed project? Or, to be completely cynical, is there simply a preference to favour the shiny and new?
In his book The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History Since 1900, historian David Edgerton suggests that “[for] many decades now the term ‘technology’ has been closely linked with invention (the creation of a new idea) and innovation (the first use of a new idea).” Discourse about the future, when bound to technology, is intertwined with discussions around originality and novelty. To open up other areas of inquiry, Edgerton prompts his readers to think about technology-in-use instead. “Time was always jumbled up, in the pre-modern era, the post-modern era and the modern era,” he writes. “We worked with old and new things, with hammers and electric drills. In use-centred history technologies do not only appear, they also disappear and reappear, and mix and match across the centuries.”
“It is about looking back to past generations’ futures and encouraging visitors to realise that our own sense of our future is relative to our present, and will probably look quite different in the future.”
Considering technology-in-use was a helpful exercise when curating The Future Starts Here. It was this methodology that first led me to question not just what, but also whose futures we were addressing in our show. Shortly after joining the V&A in late 2015, I was briefed about the exhibition’s narrative as it stood at that time. My immediate feedback was that the show – at least in its material representation – appeared to favour initiatives from western Europe and the US. For an exhibition aiming to achieve a global reach, geographic – alongside other forms of – representation would need to be made more even and/or interrogated through exhibition texts and programming. A great deal of emphasis was placed on high technologies too, another characteristic of the show that I suggested required further thought.
Some steps were taken to address these points, including re-thinking object selection. The final installation that visitors encountered in the gallery space, for example, was Engineering at Home, a project by designer Sara Hendren and anthropologist Caitrin Lynch. This work focuses on a woman called Cindy, who became a quadruple amputee late in life. Rather than depending on the sophisticated prosthetic that she would later receive (a myoelectric hand), Cindy instead went about “adapting her body and environment with a variety of everyday materials and tools – using what was around her for daily tasks”. A projection of Cindy employing these everyday items – which include cable ties and self-adhesive wall hooks used to open and close zipped items and screw-top containers, respectively – was showcased in The Future Starts Here as a way of pointing to a future that includes both high-tech and low-tech devices; a future that is shaped at home, as well as in research labs and designers’ studios; and a future that is bottom-up, amateur and, overall, more inclusive.
Futures that Work.
For the most part, however, the question of “whose futures?” was tackled implicitly in The Future Starts Here, which is where FUTURES – adopting a more explicit tone when discussing inclusivity and representation – is more effective. The pluralised title of the latter, “FUTURES”, demonstrates this straightforwardly, while a reading of the show’s contents beyond its frontier technologies illustrates that it does, in fact, attempt to both de-centre high technologies and acknowledge diverse futures. In the section Futures that Work, initiatives such as the Virgin Hyperloop (a high-speed mass transportation system) and MIT’s “second-skin” space suit sit adjacent to low-tech craft and nature projects. There are clutch bags constructed of fish leather, created by designer Elisa Palomino-Perez as a prompt for envisioning a more sustainable fashion industry, and Capsula Mundi, a biodegradable burial capsule devised by designers Anna Citelli and Raoul Bretzel. It is a far cry from the kind of techno-utopian futures we may be more used to.
In addition to this greater diversity of futures represented, another strength of the exhibition is the way in which it is embedded in local contexts, particularly through its focus on US-specific histories and developments. “We wanted to firmly root ourselves in the US,” explains Montgomery. “We wanted to use the US as a point of departure, but still include some global perspectives.” In the section Futures that Unite, visitors learn about the positive contribution of grassroots networks on developing infrastructure in the US via the case of the Rural Electrification Administration, a network that utilised cooperatives to bring electric power to rural areas in the 1930s. Elsewhere, exhibition goers encounter US architect Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic domes – constructions that were intended to make human shelters more comfortable and efficient – as well as writer Stewart Brand’s counterculture magazine, the Whole Earth Catalog, which promoted self-sufficiency and individual empowerment.
Drawing on stories and environments that would likely be more familiar to – and would, therefore, better resonate with – the AIB’s mostly US-based audiences contributes to the success of FUTURES, with this “more local than global” strategy enabling the curatorial team to offer some fresh perspectives. It is this aspect of the show that sets it apart from other exhibitions like it and, for me as a curator, also opens up unresolved questions around the limitations of projects such as The Future Starts Here, which aim for a global reach.
Tracing Historical Legacies
The FUTURES exhibition journey starts with the past. Featuring objects from the Smithsonian collections (many of which were selected by curator Abraham Thomas before his departure to The Met in 2020), the show’s introductory section, Past Futures, offers an eclectic mix of historical visions of the future: past predictions that did not come to fruition, as well as inventions such as Bakelite that were once considered futuristic. As an exhibition text highlights, the objects displayed in Past Futures demonstrate that “[we] cannot understand the future without first understanding the past[...] Taken together, these historical visions shaped A gesture-controlled FUTURES Beacon display our present, as well as the dreams we have for the future.” Much has come before us, and these preceding ideas and things have legacies that continue to impact our world today.
A Citizen Science education space in the Futures that Unite portion of the exhibition.
Legacies such as these reverberate through the AIB/Smithsonian itself, specifically in the institution’s links to world’s fairs histories, which require further scrutiny. The World’s Fair of 1876, for instance, was ostensibly organised to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the signing of the US Declaration of Independence. However, as various researchers have shown, there were other motivations for hosting such an event. In her book Power and Posterity: American Art at Philadelphia’s 1876 Centennial Exhibition and through various journal articles, art historian Kimberly Orcutt has argued that the fine arts at the 1876 World’s Fair were wielded to write (or re-write) a national art history following the American Civil War. The revision of art historical narratives would contribute towards a wider goal of constructing “a triumphal account of American progress, one that would link the nation’s illustrious past to its troubled present as it dealt with the[...] traumas of Reconstruction.”
Other scholars have illustrated how the 1876 World’s Fair – and world’s fairs more generally – were laced with racism, with displays enforcing the idea of a “natural” racial hierarchy that separated “Western” and “non-Western” peoples into complex categories. Writing in his book All the World’s a Fair: Visions of Empire at American International Expositions, 1876- 1916, historian Robert W. Rydell contends that the world’s fairs “existed as part of a broader universe of white supremacist entertainments[...] International expositions, where science, religion, the arts and architecture reinforced each other, offered Americans a powerful and highly visible, modern, evolutionary justification for long-standing racial and cultural prejudices.” The Smithsonian Institution, moreover, helped to reinforce these prejudices, providing ethnographic objects or “specimens” and creating dioramas that were used to represent POC (especially Native American and Indigenous) communities at these international expositions.
Although the Smithsonian’s complicity in these processes is not fully explored by the FUTURES curatorial team, some of the difficult histories of the world’s fairs are recollected and examined by featured artists. In the Past Futures section, adjacent to a series of display cases containing various world’s fairs souvenirs and ephemera, is Block Out the Sun. Created by Stephanie Syjuco, an American artist of Filipina heritage, this work takes the 1904 St Louis World’s Fair as its starting point, drawing particular attention to the event’s “Living Exhibits”, which presented Indigenous people “like animals in a zoo”. Of these exhibits, the Filipino Village, which “displayed” more than 1,000 people over seven months, was the largest, and marked the recent colonisation of the Philippines at the time by the US. Reflecting on these histories, Syjuco has rephotographed images of the 1904 World’s Fair, but obscured them with her hands “as if to physically obstruct the racism they document,” a wall text notes. “The artwork reminds us that stories about the future are never neutral.”
The exclusionary legacies of world’s fairs are traced elsewhere in Past Futures as well. A text panel titled “Promise and Protest” notes that the New York World’s Fair of 1964 was met with protests, as the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), an African-American civil rights organisation, highlighted the striking contrast “between the fair’s shining future vision and the neglect of the city’s Black and Puerto Rican neighbourhoods”. Floyd Bixler McKissick, the second director of CORE and a civil rights lawyer, would go on to propose plans for Soul City in the late 1960s, a community that was to be constructed on former plantation land in North Carolina and administered by African Americans. This initiative – represented in FUTURES with a Soul City promotional pamphlet accompanied by a short film – was prevented from being fully realised due to economic and legal challenges.
The overarching aim of Past Futures, as co-curator Glenn Adamson explains, “is about looking back to past generations’ futures and encouraging visitors to realise that our own sense of our future is relative to our present, and will probably look quite different in the future.” The opening section of FUTURES sets the tone well, highlighting that “[we] are, after all, only the latest in a long line of future-makers.”
Exhibiting Plural Futures
While the concept of plural futures suffuses FUTURES, it is the section titled Futures that Unite that illustrates these ideas most effectively. The panel text for this segment of the show poses a number of questions: “What might ‘people power’ look like in the future? What will it take for us to live in ways that are more equitable, peaceful and inclusive? Given our diverse perspectives, how can we best make decisions about our shared futures, together?” Here, visitors are not only introduced to human-to-human cooperation, but also ideas around collaborating with animals, plants and robots. A sprawling installation called The Co-Lab, developed with software company Autodesk, invites visitors to co-design virtual future communities with an AI partner. “Futures that Unite is about unity, choice, and the full spectrum of inclusion”, says Montgomery. This hall is a more quiet, thoughtful and mindful space. Overall, it is not as shiny or flashy or technologically oriented as the others, but it is still a meaningful offering towards the broader spectrum of the show.”
Futures that Unite.
The projects presented in Futures that Unite broach various topics, from affordable healthcare made available through open science, to the possibility of accessible video games played with your eyes, as well as biotechnologies used to enable couples of any gender to have children genetically related to both parents. On one end of the room is Futures We Dream, a series of eight videos made by independent filmmakers in collaboration with grassroots groups to highlight social justice issues across the US, including Indigenous rights, youth incarceration and immigration. By drawing attention to everyday issues and community-driven action, these short films speak to the “meaningful offering” that Montgomery describes, even if their placement in a corner of the space – away from the majority of other exhibits – regrettably locates them on the periphery of the central conversation(s).
At the other end of the room, a monument-like structure covered entirely in rhinestones glimmers, commanding attention. Titled The Grove, this sculptural piece was created by Devan Shimoyama in response to the displacement of communities in the US as a result of gentrification. The work itself comprises four “DIY” utility poles, each decorated with silk flowers and connected by criss-crossing wires. Dangling from these wires are several pairs of shimmering shoes. “Thinking about the phrase ‘Futures that Unite’ and thinking about this exhibition as a whole, which is largely technologically rooted, I thought how fitting would it be to integrate something that’s very much the antithesis of tech,” says Shimoyama. “The materials used in the work are those that I associate with DIY craft traditions, of spontaneous memorial, and the ways in which communities of colour, or low-income communities – or any communities really – come together to celebrate life and mourn the loss of something. So I really wanted to pay homage to those communities.”
Yet while the projects showcased in FUTURES may be diverse, more needs to be done to reflect these values in the make-up of the curatorial and exhibition teams. It is striking, for example, that only one person of colour serves on the former, a situation that is all-too-familiar from my own experiences of museum work. If museums and cultural organisations are to transform into inclusive spaces, further effort is required by the decision-makers of these institutions to ensure representational balance within workforces, and to re-think and replace old hierarchies and organisational structures, promoting collective action and co-production in their place. As Sharon Heal, director of the Museums Association, remarks: “If we really do want to move beyond the status quo we have to accept that museums are not neutral spaces, ours is not the only authority and that challenge, dialogue and debate should be the new heart of our museums.”
Speaking about representation amongst the FUTURES curatorial team, co-curator Molese, who forms a part of AIB’s equity team, says: “We want to be transparent about this, both from the Smithsonian’s own history standpoint and also within our own equity work.” It will take time, of course, for Molese and her colleagues to prompt meaningful change from within their institution, though their achievements will only go so far as those in power at the Smithsonian will allow. Borrowing from the writer Audre Lorde, I can’t quite shift the feeling that “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House.”
1 “Why should this exhibition be here at the V&A and not across the road at the Science Museum?” was a frequent question from V&A senior management.
Words Zara Arshad
Photographs courtesy of the Smithsonian Institute and Rockwell Group
FUTURES was on display at the Smithsonian AIB until 6 July 2022. Rockwell Group paid for Disegno’s visit to the exhibition.
This article was originally published in Disegno #33. To buy the issue, or subscribe to the journal, please visit the online shop.