Welcome to the Urgent Futures podcast, the show that finds {signals} in the noise. Each week, I sit down with leading thinkers whose research, concepts, and questions clarify the chaos, from culture to the cosmos.
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My guest this week is 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 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 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.
By the way, if you live in Singapore (or if you’re traveling there), make sure to check out Another World is Possible at ArtScience Museum, a massive exhibition co-curated by Liam with the museum, which features his work alongside pieces by Björk, Torlarp Larpjaroensook, Osborne Macharia, Ong Kian Peng, Jakob Kudsk Steensen, Ming Wong, and more.
The coming century is going to be…hard, to put it mildly. What can we do about it? What are the unintended consequences of the actions we do take? And how exactly do art and storytelling factor into the responses to these questions?
Today’s guest has ideas that are going to be a jolt for many of you. An easy example? His ongoing worldbuilding project, Planet City, which proposes that one response to climate change and biodiversity loss would be to compress the entire future global population of 10 billion people into a contiguous “planet city” roughly the size of the state of Texas—thereby letting the rest of the world rewild. Another? The idea that controversial and likely problematic geoengineering and carbon capture technologies are going to be vital in preserving habitability of life on Earth—at least the life that exists today, including us. As they say, “desperate times call for desperate measures.”
These might initially sound like armchair thought experiments, but in Liam’s hands they’re rigorously researched projects rooted in observable data, and the creative implementation of foresight methodologies, which he has pursued for years, drawing on his early training as an architect. To me, even though they evoke an inevitable discomfort, they are prime examples of what art and storytelling can and must be in times of crisis: radical speculative imaginaries that shake us out of default thought processes. We get into all of it and more—so please enjoy this provocative conversation with Liam Young.
Another episode you might like:
Peter Brannen: What You Need to Know About the Five Mass Extinctions (to Understand the Sixth Extinction) | #36
Welcome to the Urgent Futures podcast, the show that finds {signals} in the noise. Each week, I sit down with leading thinkers whose research, concepts, and questions clarify the chaos, from culture to the cosmos.
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CREDITS: This podcast is edited and produced by Adam Labrie and me, Jesse Damiani. Adam Labrie also directed, shot, and edited the video version of the podcast, which is available on YouTube. The podcast is presented by Reality Studies. If you appreciate the work I’m doing, please subscribe and share it with someone you think would enjoy it.
Find more episodes of Urgent Futures at: youtube.com/@UrgentFutures. Past conversations include Taylor Lorenz, Lisa Messeri, Legacy Russell, William E. Rees, Renée DiResta, and more. Here is another recent episode on the danger of age verification laws with
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