Always Tomorrow Now

What’s the story of the Museum of Tomorrow?

In 2009, the idea came up of using some empty warehouses at the harbor to implement a museum of sustainability, looking at environmental issues. But there was already a project for a sustainability museum in the Botanical Garden. Still, perhaps we could keep the idea of sustainability and use it in another facility.

The question was “What does Rio de Janeiro not have?”

A contemporary science museum. So, let’s make a science museum, but an original one. Let’s build a new building with a world-class architect, so the building itself becomes an architectural icon, and helps the process of renewing the harbor area in downtown Rio. Then Santiago Calatrava was called, and this disused pier was chosen for the location.

And while everything is new, let’s make a new kind of museum.

What about this proposal attracted you?

It was daring. It had none of the usual boundaries or limitations, and it could have very important consequences for the diffusion of science in Brazil. This was the first thing that attracted me—the ambition of the project. They wanted to develop something from scratch, to devise a new kind of science museum.

We had a fantastic team of consultants, from both Brazil and abroad, and they taught us about other important science museums around the world. This consultation was very, very important because it told us what not to do.

What were some of the things that you wanted to avoid?

A museum which relied on physical objects to speak about science and technology. So what could we do? We could tell the story. All knowledge starts with telling stories. We said, “Let’s tell the story using science.”

We are not a museum of science in the classical sense that we show science and the ways in which it works. We use the resources that contemporary science provides to offer the visitor a new kind of experience. We want to engage people that never come to a museum, and for them to hear and feel science telling them a story. And the story has a beginning, a middle, and many ends.

Say more about that.

In our daily life, we have an image of time, and this image is very precise, very sophisticated. It has its roots in a fantastic artifact, the mechanical clock from the thirteenth century. What the mechanical clock did was free men’s activities from the sun. Time became independent of natural cycles. It is as if time as a living phenomenon became subdued by time as an artifact, a construction. We submitted to a certain image of time as universal, being the same everywhere, for everybody, in any circumstances. Half an hour in a dentist’s chair is the same half an hour when you’re embracing your lover—although your feeling of it is completely different.

Einstein said something to that effect. ¹

Yes, precisely. This concept of time spread out and subdued our idea of nature and our own ways of living.

But the problem with this concept of time: it is linear. So you have one past, which is the place of causes, you have one present, which is the place of action, and you have just one future, the place of effects. This linearity has no place for indeterminacy, no place for chance, no place for invention, no place for creation.

We wanted to bring to the Museum of Tomorrow a different concept of time. The idea that in the present, you prepare, you make a different path to different possible futures. It’s not a river in the sense that you have one source and one end. You have, in fact, a delta of possibilities. And according to the choices that you make today, this or that different future scenario will be favored.

Cause and effect. That’s what science is about. That’s what the Museum is about.

But not linear or singular cause and effect.

Not linear, not singular. In the present there are the roots of many different possible futures, not just one.

You know, that observation is the premise of the field of foresight.

This is the central philosophical concept of the Museum, that tomorrow is not a date on the calendar, tomorrow is not a place where you will arrive; tomorrow is a construction. Tomorrow is open to be built.

And how does the organization of the Museum impart this concept to visitors?

We settled on telling a story which in effect comprises a journey of exploration, organized in five great areas, a dialogue with the architecture. Calatrava provides us with five roof undulations that roughly define the areas in which we set our museography.

The story’s five frames must be permanent and enduring, but its contents must be always renewed, because science’s concepts are always being renewed. Contrary to other museums that have a collection they want to preserve, our collection—our trends, tendencies, prospects, and forecasts—these must be renewed constantly, otherwise we become a museum of yesterday very quickly.

That goes to the choice that the museum should be entirely digital, so we can have control of all the information, graphics, photos, and videos. It is updatable at will.

We have had already around thirty updates in the first six months. Some minor ones, but some huge. For instance, gravitational waves, which were described as a possibility, have now been detected. On the other hand, we had a concept everybody thought was valid, that in our body there are ten times as many living organisms as the number of our cells; around one hundred trillion cells, and one quadrillion organisms living in us. But a new measure published in Nature magazine said no; it’s just double! (See Abbott 2016.) And we had a major environmental disaster, the Mariana disaster, which killed an entire river, and we have to put that into our Anthropocene exhibition.

So we came to the idea that the story should be made up of a sequence of great questions that mankind has always asked itself, so we could say in a very real sense that our content is questions.

Where do we come from?

Who are we?

Where are we?

Where are we heading?

How do we want to go; which values do we want to convey to the future?

This is the spinal column of the museum. We use science content to illustrate these great questions, and the idea is that people come to realize that the future is not done, the future is in the making. It is in their hands, at least in part—to collaborate, to take part in this future-building.

That is a laudable intention! But the assumptions of linearity that we talked about—dating back to the thirteenth century, to the inception of clock time—are not easily dislodged. What evidence is there that people leave the museum with a different comprehension of time?

This is the main object of our surveys of people. They say—many of them say—that they were impacted. The museum experiences are powerful enough that they understand we are telling them that a new world can be built.

It’s not a world of progress, it’s a world of choices. So it’s not about just enjoying the topic “future,” it’s about ethics. It’s about what choices do you make today in order to create the world you would like to live in, and in which you would like your children to live?

In a certain sense, it is more important for us to have ethical guidelines than just to have correct scientific content. We affirm these ethical values. They are not scientific content, they are the moral of the story. The moral is we have to reshape the way in which we live with the world. Sustainability. We have to reshape the way in which we live with each other. Conviviality. Tolerance. These are values that we affirm to the visitors. So visitors can ponder not just scientific information or data or facts or prospects or tendencies or trends, but they can also consider values.

This idea of a museum that isn’t about the past but is about the future, about choice, about ethics, does it have any precedents or parallels elsewhere in the museum world?

As far as we know, no, it doesn’t. ²

You made a very deliberate choice in naming this institution “The Museum of Tomorrow”; can you speak to that?

How do you deal with categories so heavy with history, with common sense, with common use, as “present,” “past,” “future,” “today,” “now,” “ever?” They are ingrained into people’s understandings.

In the common sense, the future is far away. Yet tomorrow is always here. Somewhere, at this precise moment, the sun is rising in the east; it’s tomorrow there. All the time, it is tomorrow somewhere. This idea that tomorrow is always inside every now was what convinced us that it’s a “museum of tomorrow,” not a “museum of the future.”

Notice that I’m using spatial categories, proximity and distance, to speak about the distinction between future and tomorrow. We feel that this was the most straightforward way to convey to people that we are not telling them about what will be, we’re telling them about what could be.

A museum about things that haven’t happened yet faces certain challenges. What are those challenges from a curator’s standpoint?

The first and most difficult one is that the only thing you can be sure about tomorrow is that the unexpected will take place. I learned that from the great Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer. I asked him once, “What is the thing that you do?” An impossible question, of course, to ask a creator, “How do you create?” But his answer was straightforward. He said, “I always look for the unexpected. I search for the unexpected.”

We established some trends which will shape the future some decades ahead: what science tells us about the possible scenarios for the climate, the changing of biodiversity, the growth of the population, the number and complexity of cities. From all these you can forecast some reasonable scenario. But what about the unexpected that these forecasts cannot and will not take into account?

We did not want to become a museum of prophecy. That was the greatest challenge, the greatest danger, because people would come here and say, “Well, you’re telling us that the future will be this.” That’s not what we want to do. We want you to understand that the present is this, and the future? Well, there are many. This is the point; the futures are plural.

A museum of questions rather than a museum of answers.

Yes, yes, precisely.

So where did this concept of plural futures come from for you?

It comes from philosophy. It comes from a philosophical tradition which stems from Epicurus and crosses through Spinoza and the nineteenth century Marx and Nietzsche. They developed this concept that time is not linear. Time is not fixed. That, in fact, time is this ever-spreading construction that stems out from the present.

This is also an idea from the Orient and Taoism, where you hear some very similar concepts of this future-producing present. It’s curious because they’re very alike. They have nothing to do with each other, but in a certain sense are very alike.

I don’t get the impression from the way you describe these influences that they were necessarily obvious or widely held by others who you speak with.

No. In fact, this concept of time as a multiplicity is something that I’ve been developing and studying for some years. So when the opportunity to become part of the museum team came, I offered these explorations so we could structure the story.

People understood that it was something different from the everyday perspective, but also understood that this was exactly what we want, too. Science takes us away from common sense. Perhaps the most important concept that contemporary science has brought to us in a very practical sense is complexity.

Complexity means that we, today, have trends, we have directions, we have goals, we have aims. But we do not have chains. If you embrace the concept of complexity, then you cannot contemplate the idea that from a particular set of circumstances, you arrive to just one which can be predicted as a 100 percent forecast.

Complexity entails multiplicity.

Yes, complexity entails multiplicity, exactly. And when we take it seriously, we have to renew the concept of time. Time in this clock, chronometric sense, is very useful for many things, but there are other aspects of life that must be addressed through other means, through other concepts.

For instance, creativity, I think, has nothing to do with linearity. You need to fight linearity, so that from a particular set of causes you can reach the unexpected, not previously contained within the set of causes, you see? The concept of innovation is so important for us. Again, it does not mean that we arrive at a certain utopic future; it has to do with the fact that every step on the way will change the ways in which we are walking. A poet would say it much better than I can!

When you talk about needing to have a certain emotional impact on visitors, what’s the goal?

We have a very large spectrum of attendees, so I think this is something you have to be very careful about. But you want to take people away from their everyday perspective so they can understand that the world in which we live is much more complex, varied, surprising, full of wonderment than everyday life which uses you, trains you, and tames you to become a useful citizen, a working citizen.

We want to provide a sort of entertainment; entertaining in the sense that it distracts you from your usual ways of thinking. They just cannot become indifferent! If they leave the museum just as they came into it, we have failed completely. But if they are disturbed, well, that’s okay.

What about the Brazilian context, and Rio in particular? Are there any special challenges or affordances for this project?

Again, there are many dimensions involved. First, perhaps the fact that we are a museum open to the future, but we are sitting in the very heart of Rio de Janeiro’s history. You can see all the landmarks of centuries around us. This heart of the city was abandoned for decades. So we are in a way a flagship of this new moment, of this new period of the city’s story.

I think the Cariocas, the people of Rio, understood that. They took possession of the renewed plaza, because you know, it’s theirs. So the neighbors, they are engaging. People from everywhere, they are engaging.

On the other hand, we have the very difficult condition of the country at the moment. The legitimate government was overthrown by a parliamentary coup, and a bunch of gangsters took power for themselves. So we are in a struggle for democracy itself, the very core of democracy, which is respecting the results of elections.

But many people tell us that the museum is a counterpoint to this situation. This is something inspiring. We wanted to inspire people—but I did not know that it would be in this sense, that we became a symbol of a better future for the country.

The invitation to regard the future as shapeable and as plural is a deeply political position.

Certainly. You cannot deal with conviviality, with living together, without politics. It’s impossible. So in fact, we are a political museum. We cannot say that as a slogan because people would not understand it in that sense. They would think that we are engaging in this or that political party, which is not our intention.

I see vast potential not just in this institution, but in this category of institution, a kind of museum that is needed everywhere. There is a need for effective invitations to people, to draw out their vision for how things could be different.

I understand and I agree completely, because I think this is a path for renewing democracy itself.