This immersive exhibition from Australian filmmaker and architect Liam Young is impressively audacious, taking up multiple spaces in the Barbican, including a rather pungent underground carpark.
What is In Other Worlds? Well, it’s not an art exhibition in the classic sense, but a sort of multimedia hybrid of visual art, storytelling, and speculative sci-fi, combined to make the point that while humanity has famously screwed up the planet, the means to un-screw it are within our grasp if we embrace radical solutions. If that sounds a bit worthy for you, then sure, it is kind of worthy. At the same time, it’s weird, psychedelic and vividly imaginative, offering more a sort of fever dream of a possible future than an actual pragmatic solution for climate change et al.
At its centre is the mad vision of the Planet City, an unimaginably dense single urban environment in which all ten billion of Earth’s inhabitants live, while the rest of the planet is effectively allowed to rewild, with visits to nature confined to a sort of annual opportunity for every citizen on the planet to be dropped randomly somewhere on the planet.
This is obviously an insane idea, but the vision Young and collaborators present is nonetheless really weird and cool. Physically, we’re presented with taller-than-a-person scale models of gargantuan tower blocks comprising of individual homes madly piled on top of one another, while a giant screen projects a Young-directed digital film shows us a vision of the surreal permanent carnival that dances, never-ending, through the impossible city’s hundred-mile-long streets. Meanwhile, on headphones, you can listen to good old Richard Ayoade narrating a story about an expedition out of Planet City to a random spot of nature that turns out to be the Serengeti.
This is haunting speculative fiction, not the recommendations of an environmental think tank
The Planet City is the compelling centrepiece to, er, well, kind of more stuff like that: other celebrity voices (Diago Luna, Jeffrey Wright, Denise Gough) offer largely optional storytelling narratives that you can listen to at little headphone stations. There are several contributions from Aboriginal Australian actor Natasha Wanganeen, with aspects of Young’s future visions clearly shaped by Aboriginal Australian culture – part of the exoticism of the exhibition, perhaps, comes from the fact Aboriginal futurism is about as unusual a sci-fi subgenre as it gets.
At its best it’s very compelling. There’s artistry and strangeness and almost absurd attention to detail in the best bits of Young’s vision. This is haunting speculative fiction, not the recommendations of an environmental think tank. It also makes the point well that while we’re probably not going to make a big crazy city of 10 billion people (Young may believe this, but I don’t), the basic fact of the matter is that humanity’s salvation is within humanity’s hands. We can do some weird stuff to get us out of our current mess! We’ll probably have to!
Is this actually a particularly sophisticated point? And is an immersive art exhibition as good a way to articulate it as, say, a book or a film? I mean maybe not, and certainly In Other Worlds doesn’t feel especially incisive given its size – it lumbers a bit, and takes a couple of rooms to warm up. Still, it makes its points, and it’s pretty bloody spectacular when it gets going. And really, when else are you going to see a massive speculative fiction sci-fi extravaganza in an art gallery?
