Liam Young: Planetary Imaginaries

Our relationship to the future has forever been filtered through the delirium of our imagined worlds. For centuries, we have fled into fictions to wrestle with the unbearable questions of our own making. Now, at the edge of catastrophe, when the very idea of a future trembles, our generation is called to the quiet, defiant labor of hope, to find light when the world grows dark.

Created by director and worldbuilder Liam Young and expanded through collaborations with acclaimed science fiction authors drawn from across the globe, Planetary Imaginaries presents a chorus of stories that sprawl from the microscopic to the planetary. Across films and fragments, movie miniatures and ceremonial costumes, action figures and speculative architectures, the exhibition maps a constellation of fictional worlds, visions of wonderous resistance and new mythologies for an Earth remade.

Science fiction has long been our shared rehearsal space for our collective dreams of what might yet be. Once, the future was written in neon. The hackers and ghosts of Cyberpunk dreamt amid the circuitry of early machines, the gardens and communes of Solarpunk tended fragile ecologies in the ruins of industry. Yet today, as the slow emergencies of the present unfold, the imagination has grown weary of collapse. Stepping out from the long shadows of the dystopias of futures past the exhibition chronicles a new aesthetic language for this age of consequences, an epoch of Planetary Punk, imaginings of immense undertakings and impossible repairs, of geoengineered skies and restless infrastructures, of humanity grappling with the terrible beauty of the vast restoration projects that lay before us.

Encounter stories of infrastructures that resemble mountains and oceans, where computation becomes cathedral, where islands bloom atop the drowned spires of oil rigs turned to coral, where megacities fold inward to make room for planetary parks, and indigenous rockets rise from the rusting lungs of gas fields, where a spacecraft, our last emissary, drifts into the deep silence between stars. Stories weathered by the sobering knowledge that our hopeful futures are written in the geology of a once wounded earth. Here, within these Planetary Imaginaries, we are called to dream again, to invent new worlds that are a testimony to our boundless desires and our fragile chance to begin.

Liam Young is a designer, director and BAFTA nominated producer who operates in the spaces between design, fiction and futures. Described by the BBC as ‘the man designing our futures’, his visionary films and speculative worlds are both extraordinary images of tomorrow and urgent examinations of the environmental questions facing us today. As a worldbuilder he visualizes the cities, spaces and props of our imaginary futures for the film and television industry and with his own films he has premiered with platforms ranging from Channel 4, Tribeca, Venice Biennale, the BBC and the Guardian and they have been collected by institutions such as MoMA, Smithsonian, Art Institute of Chicago, SF MoMA, the Victoria & Albert Museum and the National Gallery of Victoria amongst many others.

In parallel to his work in entertainment he is in demand as one of the worlds foremost futurists consulting on next generation technologies and designs for clients such as Nike, BMW, Google, Sony, Mitsubishi, Wired, Showtime, Microsoft, Ford, NASA JPL, L’Oreal, the Dubai Government, DHL and numerous others. His work is informed by his academic research and has held guest professorships at Princeton University, MIT, and Cambridge and now coordinates the groundbreaking Masters in Fiction and Entertainment at SCI-Arc in Los Angeles. He has published several books including the recent Machine Landscapes: Architectures of the Post Anthropocene and Planet City, a story of a fictional city for the entire population of the earth.