Part of the XDP Seminar Speaker Series.
Join XDP guest artist Liam Young for a lecture/performance entitled Planet City and the Return of Global Wilderness.
Following centuries of colonisation, globalisation and never-ending economic extraction, we have remade the world from the scale of the cell to the tectonic plate. In the storytelling performance Planet City and the Return of Global Wilderness, we go on a science fiction safari through an imaginary city for the entire population of the earth, where 10 billion people surrender the rest of the world to a global scaled wilderness and the return of stolen lands. Set against the consistent failure of nation states to act in any meaningful way against climate change, Planet City emerges from a global citizen consensus, a voluntary and multi-generational retreat from our vast network of cities and entangled supply chains into one hyper-dense metropolis.
About Liam Young
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 world builder, 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, Apple+, SxSW, Tribeca, the New York Metropolitan Museum, The Royal Academy, Venice Biennale, the BBC, and the Guardian. His films have been collected internationally by museums such as the New York Met, Art Institute of Chicago, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the National Gallery of Victoria, and M Plus Hong Kong. He has been acclaimed in both mainstream and design media including features with TED, Wired, New Scientist, Arte, Canal+, Time magazine, and many more. His fictional work is informed by his academic research, and he has held guest professorships at Princeton University, MIT, and Cambridge.
Liam now runs 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.