T
here’s a beautiful future ahead, but maybe not for all of us. On a recent
trip to Tokyo and Seoul, I encountered a trio of “museums of the
future”—the Mori Art Museum, the Mori Digital Art Museum/
TeamLab Borderless, and SKT T.um—where art and engineering come
together to provide visions of 2050 and beyond.
These smart, eye-opening, and thought-provoking exhibits are full of hope, but
they left me wondering if the United States can keep up or whether we’ll be left
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MORI ART MUSEUM: CONTEMPLATING THE FUTURE
The Mori Art Museum is at the top of a skyscraper in Tokyo’s Roppongi Hills
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gigantic Louise Bourgeois spider sculpture. At night, you rise via escalator from
the streets of Tokyo into a quieter, orderly place, then ascend even farther on
long elevators to Mori’s aerie.
The museum’s current Future and the Arts show features the good, the bad, and
the weird of the future. I was most taken by the city designs: ways for us to live
together in a hotter, wetter, more connected world. There are also experiments
in 3D-printed buildings and food (sushi ends up looking like Legos), some really
creepy post-humanist printed organs, and a chair you can sit in while
disturbingly realistic, auto-generated bot tweets descend on printed tape from
the ceiling.
