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"Thousands of museum professionals gathered Sunday in Houston to mull their futures and contemplate ways to recast their missions and audiences. Participants at the American Association of Museums' annual conference pondered possibilities that included a multiple-voucher system in which museums compete to meet certain components of a public school child's education. They even discussed a "Facebook update from hell" that would simultaneously publish everyone's personal data - including information museums have gathered in order to personalize visitor experiences."

"Great expectations and a virtual world are among the megatrends changing the role of museums and arts organisations. The megatrends, identified by CSIRO trend analyst Stefan Hajkowicz, are a major shift in the cultural, economic, social, environmental and technological milieu that are expected to radically change the context of everything we do over the next 20 years. Some of the trends go to the very nature of why people come to museums, raising the possibility that museums, galleries and theatres could replace shops as the 'third place' where people congregate. Others will change the processes by which our organisations operate and the subjects on which we focus. Speaking at the Musuems Australia National Conference in Canberra on Shaping the Future of Museums, Dr Hajkowicz said while some changes were 'black swans' - phenomena never seen until a major change of environment - many were more like a 'kangaroo in the headlights', who sees the car coming but remains frozen. He gave the example of Eastman Kodak, which was involved in the development of the digital camera in 1975 but failed to change its business model from dependence on film and filed for bankruptcy in 2011."

"AAM's Center for the Future of Museums (CFM) helps museums explore the cultural, political and economic challenges facing society and devise strategies to shape a better tomorrow. CFM is a think-tank and research and design lab for fostering creativity and helping museums transcend traditional boundaries to serve society in new ways."

""We want to demolish museums and libraries," the fevered Italian aesthetic revolutionary F.T. Marinetti declared in his 1909 Futurist Manifesto. "Museums, cemeteries!" Maybe so, maybe no. I'll vote no -- and so, I think, would photographer Richard Barnes, whose fascinating exhibit "Animal Logic," which documents the Smithsonian and other natural history museums as containers of imagined histories and outrageous dreams, is on view this month at Blue Sky Gallery. "

Facebook users who want an interesting (and perhaps creepy) visualization of their activity on the world's largest social network can get it with the help of Intel's new Museum of Me application. Read more: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13506_3-20068257-17/intels-facebook-museum-of-me-is-a-must-try/#ixzz1UOjMmAlE

"At the 2010 AAM Annual Meeting, the Center for the Future of Museums (CFM) invited the Pinky Show to interview attendees about their visions of the future. This video presents clips from those interviews, edited by CFM. Stay tuned for an official Pinky Show presentation! Visit www.PinkyShow.org to read the cats' report on their expedition to museums of the future."

Vitaliy and Elena's implicit answer: art will survive, as it always has, even if there is nothing left of the society that bore it. The important thing is that humanity's fixation upon the apocalypse--which they think is viewed in the modern world as an inevitability--does not paralyze us to stop designing and creating new things. Even after we're gone, Vitaliy and Elena imagine Earth as a dead world in which museums play time capsules to humanity's all too ephemeral creative spirit. Because art survives, and it will be all that is left of us when we're gone.

"In his classic novel "Invisible Cities," Italo Calvino envisioned a building, in a city called Fedora, containing a series of small globes. The visitor peering into each would see a small city, a model of a different Fedora. "These are the forms the city could have taken," wrote Calvino, "if for one reason or another, it had not become what we see today." In the real world, one can stand on a street in Manhattan and look into one's iPhone, where the app "Museum of the Phantom City: Other Futures" reveals the New York that might have been: from the fantastic (Buckminster Fuller's projected Midtown-covering dome) to the nearly realized (Diller and Scofidio's Eyebeam Museum)."

Museums of the Future talk at TEDx Sydney

Future generator from London underground -