Want to invest in sci-fi tech? Now's your chance
The Åzone Futures Market is a new online exhibition, launched by the Guggenheim museum in New York, which encourages visitors to place bets on a simulated stock market where a range of prototype technologies are on the cards.

The aim is to give audiences a new, engaging way to explore the increasing significance of technologically-driven change on culture at large.

Everyone who logs into the site can automatically bet 10,000 Cåin, the local currency, on various emerging products and services, like artificial intelligence, commercialised space travel and genetic manipulation.

There’s also a free, crowd-sourced news feed and visual trends diary to reflect the type of market insight most investors in financial markets would receive.

“We need new cultural forms to make sense of the radical effects of technological change on our lives today,” explains Troy Conrad Therrien, curator of architecture and digital initiatives at the Guggenheim.

“Åzone Futures Market experiments with the architecture of exhibitions, replacing a physical building with a digital platform, allowing visitors to become users, and enabling contributors to respond to an environment that will emerge over time.”

Here at Protein we’ve been tracking the evolution of the traditional institution, from a physical archive to a digital platform, in our Museum 2.0 trend. Read our briefing to find out more about how curators are adapting to new audiences.