Behind-the-scenes of the future
What will our future be like? Take a peek at Museum Victoria's preparation department as they design and construct their models for the upcoming Scienceworks exhibition Think Ahead.
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In the future cars will be solar powered, they'll fly and have force fields to protect them. Humans, if there are any left, will have evolved into super swimmers with engorged feet and hands, be more reptilian or perhaps part machine.
Sound fantastic? These were some of the ideas about future living held by children consulted by Scienceworks for its forthcoming exhibition, Think Ahead. Spanning themes including cities, medicine, transport, food and housing, Think Ahead will be permanently installed from Thursday, thus presenting curators with a difficult task: how to explore life in the future without ruling out the unknown, even far-fetched, possibilities it may hold?
''This all came out of our research with kids, particularly with the younger age group,'' senior curator Kate Phillips said. ''For them, anything was possible.''
Melbourne Museum's Dean Smith peers inside the bedroom of a modern child. The model display will feature as part of the futuristic Think Ahead exhibition at Scienceworks. Photo: Simon Schluter
The distinction, it was decided, would come down to peep holes. For ideas more grounded in science-fiction than fact (mutant humans, for example) visitors will have to peer through small window displays to see the models and the museum's interpretation of what lies before us. ''Plausible visions'' of the future are openly displayed and often interactive, such as Swinburne University's ''Ruby'', a pair of robotic hands that can solve a Rubix cube in 10 seconds; or a prototype Holden car that never made it to the display room floor but was designed to explore future ideas of fuel efficiency and space.
One major feature of the exhibit, however, was never going to fit inside a small viewing box.
Using multiple touch screens and large projections, Melbourne interactive design firm ENESS' future car project encourages users to ''build'' a car and all its accoutrements: choices range from amphibious fins, wings, a bamboo chassis or perhaps an invisibility cloak. ENESS, which regularly takes on museum projects such as Bunjilaka's majestic kinetic sculpture in its First Peoples exhibit, were also the team behind Pixel Picnic, an immersive 3D performance during this year's White Night festival. In Museum Victoria's preparation department, artists, model makers and taxidermists have worked for four months on items for Think Ahead, crafting the face of an astronaut in cryogenic sleep out of silicone and animal hair or creating tiny comic books to scatter around miniature bedrooms.
The input of children, drawn from Museum Victoria's membership group as well as local primary school students, has been crucial to the exhibition's development. And for some, their dystopian visions of the future - planet Earth as a flaming pile of rubbish, is one example - have been illuminating.
Co-curator David Perkins said it's for this reason that the exhibition tries to present many possible futures.
''We wanted to give children this idea that the future isn't a set place that we're going, that it can actually change,'' he said.
Think Ahead opens at Scienceworks on December 5.
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