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THE MUSEUM OF TOMORROW:

COLONIZING OUR FUTURE
BY T. J. DEMOS

One might think our future is open and indeterminate,

waiting to be filled with meaning, the result of
our creative intention. Equally, that art and culture,
through cycles of aesthetic experimentation,
can open up new horizons, shifting the directions
of the present, transforming perception and forms
of living, altering social and political conditions—
if we so desire.

T. J. Demos is Professor in the Department of the History of Art and Visual Culture, at University of California, Santa
Cruz, and Founder and Director of its Center for Creative Ecologies. He writes widely on the intersection of contempo-
rary art, global politics, and ecology and is the author of numerous books, including Against the Anthropocene: Visual
Culture and Environment Today  (Sternberg Press, 2017);  Decolonizing Nature: Contemporary Art and the Politics of
Ecology (Sternberg Press, 2016); The Migrant Image: The Art and Politics of Documentary During Global Crisis (Duke
University Press, 2013)—winner of the College Art Association’s 2014 Frank Jewett Mather Award—and Return to the
Postcolony: Spectres of Colonialism in Contemporary Art (Sternberg Press, 2013). Demos co-curated Rights of Nature:
Art and Ecology in the Americas, at Nottingham Contemporary in January 2015, and organized Specters: A Ciné-Politics
of Haunting, at the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid in 2014.

Administrative buildings designed for the 1939 New York World’s Fair.
Photo: Margaret Bourke-White—The LIFE Picture Collection / Getty Images
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T. J. DEMOS
But that is not entirely true, especially these
days. Our future is being colonized, its potenti-
ality gradually withdrawn, in ways increasingly
visible as well as irreversible. The name of this
colonization is the Anthropocene.
Rio de Janeiro’s Museu do Amanhã, the
Museum of Tomorrow, dramatizes this situation.
BY T. J. DEMOS Built in 2015 and designed by Catalonian archi-
tect Santiago Calatrava, evoking the Brazilian
modernist tradition of Oscar Niemeyer, its fu-
turist structure lies like a beached whale turned
white skeleton in the city’s recently gentrified
port district. Its collection, almost entirely vir-
tual, offers popular-science narratives delivered
through screen-based media, introducing audi-
ences to a near future of world-changing envi-
ronmental transformation.
In fact we’re already witnessing the global
effects of climate breakdown—the disastrous
storms and wildfires, the droughts and rising
seas, growing urban populations and declining
numbers of other species. The museum ren-
ders these interconnected processes in glow-
ing media installations, presenting grids of
countless video screens, large-scale displays
of spatialized projections, including interviews
with established scientists, all designed for en-
tranced viewers. Lived existence and material
reality find themselves transmuted, and shim-
mer and dance in infinite pixels. The storyline
begins with a film codirected by Fernando
Meirelles, maker of City of God (2002), that
reduces nearly fourteen billion years of geo-
logical evolution into eight minutes of sensory
spectacle projected by nine projectors inside an
ovoid theater.
The museum boasts that it uses forty per-
cent less energy than conventional buildings,
with nine percent from solar power and a cool-
ing system that draws on and cleans water from
Above, left - Museu do Amanhã, Rio de Janeiro. Photo: Byron Prujansky
Above, right - Museu do Amanhã, Rio de Janeiro. Photo: Bernard Lessa
Guanabara Bay. But how much more energy
would it have saved if it had never been built?
This new species of museum is not one
without walls but one without objects, a smart
architecture for curated data translated into vir-
tual experience. Though its displays invoke ca-
tastrophe, it ends up reaffirming the utopia that
is the consumerist image-world of advanced
capital. Sensors networked in walls modulate
light and sound, responding to and stimulat-
ing the movement of visitors. The cybernetic
space suggests that they are agents of the envi-
ronmental design, rather than its programmed
effects. Given its sophistication of commu-
nications, it’s not surprising to learn that the
Museum of Tomorrow is a project of Brazil’s
Globo media empire, owned by the Marinho
family, longtime supporters of right-wing pol-
itics and past military dictatorships (including
the current regime of Michel Temer), for whom
the institution functions as a communications
vehicle that operationalizes and profits from the
management of information.
In this case, it tells the story of the Anthro-
pocene. Its version is the increasingly conven-
tional one announcing the geological epoch of
modernization when “human activities” be-
come the central driver of the Earth’s geophys-
ical processes. “In a few generations, we have
become a global force that has transformed the
Earth and the living conditions of other spe-
cies,” one of the museum’s Anthropocene wall
texts explains. “Our actions have significant
consequences, which will extend over the next
centuries. We and our descendants will live in
a world profoundly changed by our very pres-
ence.” That situates us within a geological in-
terstice, a time between punch and hurt, when
the industrial causes of environmental transfor-
mation—going back hundreds of years to the
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Visitors in moving chairs viewing the exhibition Futurama by General Motors, Building The World of Tomorrow,
New York World’s Fair, 1939-1940. © NYPL – New York Public Library. New York World’s Fair 1939-1940 records,
Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations
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T. J. DEMOS
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sixteenth-century origins of capitalism, which
the museum neglects to mention—have yet to
realize their full climatological consequences.
Even as our current systems of energy produc-
tion, industrial manufacturing, and conspicu-
ous consumption continue unabated.
But like so many similar narratives, the
“we” remains undefined here, its plural sub-
ject floating in the abstract, quietly including
each of us in its embrace. It’s the ideology of
the collective pronoun. Rather than innocence,
this is precisely the problem: while the muse-
um portrays the symptoms of climate break-
down, it hides the causes, distributing them
among all. In effect a museum of the neoliberal
Anthropocene, its human-centric terminology
universalizes responsibility and equalizes the
effects of climate breakdown, as if “we” are
all in this together, instead of recognizing that
developed countries and transnational corpo-
rations are disproportionately responsible his-
torically and currently for wreaking environ-
mental havoc, and that the consequences are
felt particularly in underdeveloped regions in
the Global South, affecting those who possess
few resources to weather the present and fu-
ture storms.
None of these considerations, needless to
say, figure in the Museum of Tomorrow, which
generally opts for superficial science packaged
as easily consumable visual splendor, where
scenes of calving glaciers join sensationalized
graphs and statistics in relaying banal messag-
es of unjustly shared impacts. As a result, cor-
porate and financial interests appear as saviors,
rather than as responsible for permanently
A model of a deep hole cut into Antarctic ice, leading to a weather station, where
technicians can prepare forecasts embracing whole continents, part of General Motors’
Futurama exhibition, New York World’s Fair, 1964-1965. Photo: AP Photo
126
altering our world according to their inter-
ests. The social movements challenging this
global order are disappeared, at a time when
every day matters. The further we continue
down the path of carbon pollution, the more
severe the ramifications will be. We know that
fossil-fuel corporations intend to burn all their
hydrocarbon reserves, moreover, sending us
well into climate chaos, as their financial cal-
culations are already locked in, with trillions at
stake. Petrocapital will resist any decarboniza-
tion of our energy systems—which helps ex-
plain why British Gas and Shell figure promi-
nently among the sponsors of the Museum of
Tomorrow.
As a result of selective narration, the muse-
um negates any conception of “system change,
not climate change”—the radical environmen-
tal activist demand that we change our forms
of life rather than continue to alter the envi-
ronment. Instead, it presents, and attempts to
naturalize, a future of seemingly inevitable
environmental alterations that can only be
met with more techno-fixes. Adaptation over
mitigation. Seductive images relay seeming-
ly commonsensical narratives, rendering any
social or economic transformation unnec-
essary—indeed invisible and unthinkable.
In this way, the museum appropriates the
Anthropocene thesis proposed initially by
biologist Eugene Stoermer and atmospheric
chemist Paul Crutzen in 2000 and turns it into a
petrocapitalist machine, one that not only his-
toricizes the past but also colonizes the future.
Yet the Anthropocene is really an emerging
site of conflict and contestation.
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T. J. DEMOS
While it has been and continues to be criti-
cally engaged by cultural theorists and creative-
ly mobilized by artists and activists, the powers
of finance, energy, and media are increasing-
ly assembling around its usage, attempting to
define its significance, pushing its narration in
ways that amplify their power.
In one of its final presentations, the mu-
seum suggests that one “possible solution”
to global warming “would be to modify our
DNA, creating a human variety that would be
better suited to the conditions of the new plan-
et.” Now “we” are turned into a variety of hu-
man, altered human, or posthuman. With this,
astonishingly, the institution bypasses any
questioning of current modes of production.
In effectively accepting any and all climate
change, as if a matter of fate, it sacrifices hu-
manity as we know it, consenting to its trans-
formation into who knows what in a future
world beyond recognition. When it claims that
“there are at least a hundred billion galaxies in
the universe, each one with billions of stars and
planets” and “many offer conditions that are
capable of harboring life, perhaps even intel-
ligent life,” the museum additionally endorses
the fanciful narrative that if Earth becomes un-
livable, there are other options elsewhere, such
as Mars, another darling of the tech industry.
What becomes clear is that the Anthropocene
offers a useful storyline enabling powerful
corporations to suspend sociopolitical and
techno-economic crises that would otherwise
place their vast accumulations of wealth in
question, and with it the continued legitimacy
of world-changing petrocapitalism.
In imagining tomorrow, one wonders if the
museum’s representations don’t also become
A future life underwater, where the ocean floor is tapped for oil and vacationers relax at a resort beneath the
surface, part of General Motors’ Futurama exhibition, New York World’s Fair, 1964-1965. Photo: AP Photo
operational images of sorts, acting on the fu-
ture rather than simply picturing it, making its
realization that much more likely.
With an unfounded faith in the sciences of
synthetic biology, GMOs, and geoengineer-
ing—at the intersection of corporate science,
finance, and technology—the ongoingness
of life established over millions of years of
evolutionary history is suddenly terminated.
The world as we know it is surrendered for
the sake of business as usual. Whereas literary
critic Fredric Jameson famously noted that it’s
easier to imagine the end of the world than the
end of capitalism, we ’re now seeing capitalism
justifying the destruction of the world.
Techno-fixes, of course, are more fictional
than practicable, and geoengineering presents
what many call false solutions, risking inad-
vertent catastrophes—solar radiation manage-
ment might alter the weather here, but could
bring disastrous climate disruptions elsewhere.
More, there is no democratic governance of
the technologies of climate modification at
present—technologies that require the mas-
sive resources of wealthy states, militaries, and
corporations, but without regulations to hold
implementation accountable. Yet to propose
geoengineering as the preferred approach to
climate change, even assuming its necessity
without hesitation, is nothing short of reckless,
not only risking ecosystem collapse for a fail-
ure to stop the causes, but also doing nothing to
redress our world’s growing wealth disparity,
impoverishment, and massive dispossession.
The Rio museum indicates a trend. Across
the world, mounting corporate interests are
investing in selectively narrating and ideolog-
ically mobilizing the Anthropocene.
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California’s Breakthrough Institute ad-
vocates for a “Good Anthropocene,” if only
we redouble our commitment to a “modern-
ized environmentalism for the twenty-first
century” via support for economic growth,
nuclear energy, continued use of fossil fu-
els, and a geoengineered world. Founded by
Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus, it
counts Carl Page, brother of Google founder
Larry Page, among its funders. Meanwhile,
Breakthrough Initiatives has put a hundred
million U.S. dollars into a radio wave project
to search for alien life, and asserts: “We now
need to do much more to understand and shape
the thinking and priorities of those who prom-
ise (or threaten) to give us artificial intelli-
gence, the internet of everything, autonomous
everything, synthetic biology, and, some in-
sist, geoengineering.” The organization, un-
til recently, included the late scientist Stephen
Hawking, and is funded by Russian venture cap-
italist Yuri Milner of Digital Sky Technologies
and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg. Then there
is Harvard University’s current twenty million
U.S. dollars geoengineering project, notable for
its first-ever testing of solar radiation manage-
ment outside the lab in the Earth’s atmosphere,
a project led by David Keith, author of the 2013
View of the city of the future, where new and old architecture live side-by-side, part of
General Motors’ Futurama exhibition, New York World’s Fair, 1964-1965. Photo: AP Photo
128
book A Case for Climate Engineering, and cham-
pioned by Microsoft’s Bill Gates.
Supported by these elite interests, the neo-
liberal Anthropocene arrives at this very mo-
ment to suspend all contradictions, offering
stories and images that seek to validate a vision
of tomorrow based on the consensus of media
and IT corporations in league with the fos-
sil fuel industry and their lobbied politicians.
The problem is that with every passing mo-
ment, catastrophic climate breakdown becomes
ever more likely. Manifold environmental
transformations—including intersecting natu-
ral, social, political, and economic crises—are
challenging the world order, demanding noth-
ing less than revolution on all levels.
Instead, the Museum of Tomorrow pres-
ents viewers with glimmering screens showing
images of science reduced to advertisement.
It thereby quietly enlists our consent, recruiting
our participation in its spectacular architecture
of climate change rendered as entertainment,
even charging us a ticket for the experience.
It’s more urgent than ever to shift this narra-
tive, to democratize science and technology,
to resist the coming barbarism that is putting
the life-worlds of human civilization in peril—
before their tomorrow becomes our today.
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Top - Anthropocene section, Museu do Amanhã, Rio de Janeiro. Photo: Bernard Lessa
Bottom - Cosmos section, Museu do Amanhã, Rio de Janeiro. Photo: Byron Prujansky