Liam Young

0:05Welcome to This Cultural Life, the series in which leading artistic figures choose the influences and experiences that have most inspired their own creativity. I'm John Wilson and my guest in this episode is the Australian-born artist and filmmaker Liam Young. Often described as a speculative architect, Young creates imaginary future worlds through his films and art installations to provoke discussion about present-day social and environmental issues, including climate change, energy, migration and technology. His films, including Planet City and The Great Endeavour, have been shown at the Venice Biennale and at museums including MoMA and the Smithsonian.

0:44He holds guest professorships at universities including Princeton, MIT and Cambridge. In the commercial sector, Liam Young works as a consultant to major brands and the film industry on designing visions of the future. We met when he came to London recently for the opening of a major exhibition of his work at the Barbican Centre, a show called In Other Worlds. Liam Young, welcome to This Cultural Life. Thanks so much. Great to be here. You work across a really broad range of art forms. How do you describe what you do? What are you? Essentially, I call myself a world builder, meaning I tell stories about the global, the urban, the architectural implications of new technologies.

1:29And those stories get manifest in a series of imaginary environments and speculative futures. Primarily, what is your output? I mean, in the art gallery, in terms of the film screen, I mean, what is your prime medium of expression, do you think? Generally, I'm making films, but out of those films, I pull costumes, I pull props and objects, graphic novels, virtual reality experiences, physical installations, trying to talk outside of the crowds that might normally turn up in a museum or a more privileged or rarefied art show and present them in ways that people can connect. The word speculative architect is often attached to you.

2:09Do you recognise that term? Yes, I think about the future of cities and how you might live differently, the future of architecture and space. I don't craft buildings, but I craft visions of these worlds. They don't need to be built with bricks and mortar. They can be built with story. Built with ideas. And built with ideas, exactly. What's fascinating about your work is that you speculate about so much more than just architecture. You are exploring the future of, amongst many other things, urban living, sustainable food supplies, climate change is one of your big subjects. Are you an artist or an activist primarily?

2:49I think today it's very difficult to make art without being an activist. Otherwise, I don't know what it is that we're doing. For me, the role of an artist is to put counter-narratives into the world. Pre-pandemic, for example, I often engage a lot with technology and new technologies, things like drones, AI, driverless vehicles, and so on. and the work I was making was quite dystopian in the sense that I was, the counter-narratives I thought the world needed at that time were trying to complicate the imagery around technology. You know, we were being sold all of these systems and they were going to make our lives better.

3:31They were going to connect us better to our parents. They were going to make us healthier and fitter, whatever it was. And really what I was trying to do with the work at the time was just to say that it's not that simple. In order for all of these systems of AI governance or all these things to work, we have to give up privacy and submit ourselves to total data capture. So I was trying to bring those narratives into the world. But post-pandemic, it feels like the kind of counter-narratives the world needs is stories of hope. And if you can't be an artist without being an activist, what is the prime motivation for you all of this work that you do?

4:10Yeah, so right now we exist in this strange poly crisis as we describe it, whether it's the impending doom of climate change. I'm based in LA and the front lines of Trump's America and seeing extraordinary emergence of class warfare and new racial divisions. If you're making work today, I can't imagine how you're not making work that's engaging in this context and trying to take some position and some narrative around that that looks at how we can get ourselves out of the mess that we're creating. Sure, you're looking at all these problems, this global crisis, poly crisis, as you call it. But what's the motivation?

4:50Do you think it's is it anger? Is it the sense of being able to change the world? I think deep down, we all want to try and change the world in some form. I don't pretend to say that the work that I make is making any seismic difference. But we're in this moment where I think what we desperately need is a cultural shift. And I think a lot of the crises that we're surrounded by, I don't think they're technological problems anymore. To a large extent, a lot of my work is about mining the worlds of science and technology for solutions, solutions that are already here, which is to say that this polycrisis really is now a crisis of the imagination, a crisis of politics.

5:32and it means then that the front line of these issues is actually a cultural one and as an artist we're making work in that space to try and shift the need a little bit and help a general audience engage with these issues in new ways. Well let's look at how you do that with a specific example of a project, a proposition in a way or a provocation possibly, a thing called Planet City which speculates that one way of allowing the world to heal from the devastating effects of climate change and to return most of the planet to a state of wilderness would be to cram 10 billion people, the entire population of the planet, into a single hyper-densely populated metropolis.

6:15You know, houses stacked miles high in the air. In as brief a way as possible, what was the thinking behind that project? So Planet City is based on a theory from seminal biologist Edward O. Wilson, who has a plan that he calls Half Earth, which is the strategy to stave off mass extinction by devoting half the surface of the earth completely to nature, thereby restricting human development to the other 50%. And a lot of the work around his project is looking at how we scaffold the recovery of that natural world that we might leave space for. But as trained as an architect, I'm like, well, the massive consolidation of our existing cities and lifestyles that would be required to shrink to this remaining 50%, that's really the project I'm interested in.

6:58How do we do that? So we brought together what I call the City Council, which is an amazing network of scientists, technologists, economists, political theorists from all over the world, writers, science fiction authors, to try and figure out what this 50 % planet city would look like. And as we got going, we looked at Manila, which is the densest city that currently exists. And we realized that you could actually put 8 to 10 billion people in a city at that density that wouldn't be more than about the size of Texas. Not 50 % Earth, but 0.02 % Earth. And that became Planet City, the most extreme version of this thought experiment.

7:34You say an extreme version because your question is, how do we do that? My question would be, why would you want to do that? I mean, it's totally impractical, isn't it? So what's the point of the idea? The point of the idea is to say that we can get an extreme model of a city like that working. It's based on technology that's already here and perhaps has been here for 10 or 15 years already. If we can get that ridiculous model of a city working, there's nothing stopping us reimagining how we power or feed London or Los Angeles where I'm based or New York or Melbourne. So we're in this kind of extraordinary position where we know what we have to do.

8:13We have the means to do it. We're just not doing it because the cultural narratives, the biases, blind spots, politics and prejudices is stopping us from doing it. So a work like Planet City is to put this story into the world in its most provocative and extreme form as a means to get people talking about how we might live compactly. You presented these ideas a few years ago as a TED talk. If we listen, we can hear the hum and crackle of flickering blue and red LEDs as they illuminate the lower reaches of the city's farm fields. It smells of soil and hard drives and sweet fruit. A purple sunrise over a new kind of wild.

8:56How did that go down? Planet City is a provocation. It's to say that we can do this, not that we should do this. I haven't figured it out, pack our bags, next Tuesday we're going to move to Planet City. But instead it's to force us to confront the realities of how we currently make cities. And the real strange, bizarre fiction is not Planet City at all, but it's the assumption that we can keep on doing what we're doing, living and existing and building cities like we are. But a lot of people were misreading the project as a solution. That tends to be what Ted wants to do. Someone gets up on stage and has an eight-minute solution to all the world's problems.

9:34So I've never been more corrected in my life when I walked off the TED stage by a bunch of billionaires who were en route to their summer house in Panama rainforest, telling me how wrong I was. But was there anybody there in the audience who possibly wasn't a billionaire who said, look, all of these ideas are predicated on technological solutions, but what you're not factoring in is society, human interaction, the need to live not all together in one place for us to have separate identities and cultures and existences. I mean, how much of those ideas were factored into Planet City? I mean, that was the point of Planet City, really, to begin with, is to say that living more densely doesn't mean we live less rich lives.

10:15When we talk about dense cities and when we see them in popular culture or science fiction futures, density is typically projected as dirty or congested. But how might you think about a dense city that actually is full of life? Because the most extraordinary cities on our planet right now, the ones that we travel to and experience as tourists, they're the most dense. and when we bring people together we don't flatten cultures the differences become exaggerated and heightened and you get an extraordinary vibrant social and urban life so i want to upset that idea that in order to live a rich and fulfilled life you need to have a house with a backyard front yard four car garage and seven bathrooms and two bits at the side where you keep the bins like that's one very particular model of how we've lived and how we've constructed our lives but i It's not the only model.

11:06And it unfortunately just can't be the model going forward if we're going to continue to exist at the scales that we exist. So there's got to be other ways that we can live rich and fulfilling lives. And that's part of the interest of all of my practice. Like in Planet City, what we're trying to do is talk about a vision of a future that isn't based on sacrifice alone. And a lot of times when we talk about sustainable futures, particularly from the left, it's framed as sacrifices, which is why it's so easily shot down by the right. I'm trying to create shared narratives that feel hopeful and aspirational.

11:43They don't look like the utopias of the 60s and 70s. They feel much more challenging and provocative and unsettling. But really that's a factor of the reality that we find ourselves in, where a lot of the solutions that we talked about in the early days of ecology and environmentalism just no longer scale against the crises that we've created for ourselves. So I'm much more interested in what happens when we don't frame a future based on sacrifice, but when we celebrate the possibilities of the sort of density that Planet City puts forward as being a really rich and vibrant lifestyle.

12:21On This Cultural Life, Liam Young, my guests choose the influences and experiences that most inspired their own creative lives. And your first choice is the Usborne book of the future, which was published in 1979, the year that you were born, I think, and which you say you were fascinated by as a four-year-old boy. Before we talk about that book, tell me a bit about your upbringing, childhood. Born in Australia, whereabouts? Born in Brisbane, Australia, to a single mother who was a lecturer in childhood education and a puppeteer. And I grew up on the beach, really, in Australia, one of those classic Australian childhoods where I wouldn't wear shoes for four months of the year.

13:01And I would live my life under the sunshine out in boats and going fishing and crabbing. And I think my early formative years shaped my relationship to the environment that I'm still exploring now with my work. Because so much of the work does explore our relationship with nature and our responsibilities towards nature. So that's rooted in those childhood memories. Yeah, exactly. I mean, my summers would be spent with a group of friends leaving house first thing after breakfast and not coming back until the streetlights came on. And we'd spend the days fishing, crabbing, exploring an amazing coastline north of Brisbane.

13:37And you said your mother, single mother, was a puppeteer. Yeah. In her spare time, that was her entertainment for you? Exactly. Well, she would make puppets. Our house would be filled with puppets and massive amounts of children's books. So the Usborne book of the future, this is a picture book with text that predicts or speculates, I suppose you could argue, how life might change on Earth and in space over the course of the 21st century. What aspect of the future, as depicted in the book, most appeal to you? Well, I was interested in the general framing of the book because it was created in the year that I was born, essentially in that book was the futures I was supposed to grow up into.

14:15And like most futures of the time, it was monorails and robot mining machines, flying ambulances, food in pill form, jet packs. What I would do as a kid is like sit, you know, on the couch flicking through these pages, imagining and dreaming of these possibilities and trying to project myself into them. I don't know if I was conscious of the time, but those kinds of science fiction visions aren't about prediction or prophecy at all. Like, I don't think the true test of the Osborne book of the future from 1979 is how many of those pages actually came true. But rather, their value is in this extraordinary chronicle they offer of the fears and anxieties, the hopes and dreams of that particular moment when I was born.

15:05And that stays with me, this idea that all of these visions of the future and the ones that I make as an artist, they're really about the present. So this book is feeding your imagination with visions of the future. Did you start to create your own visions in terms of art, drawings, models? Yeah, and puppets. Puppets, yeah. I particularly loved model making as a child. My first ever job was actually as an architectural model maker. I've never worked in a bar or pulled beers or made coffees, but I made models as a job. And that's what I would do in my spare time as a hobby is just build all of these ethics kits and models of cities, buildings, planes, cars, and so on.

15:47How early on did you start thinking about the possibilities of architecture, about being an architect possibly? I don't think I ever really wanted to be an architect. And despite a few flirtations in a couple of architectural offices after I graduated, I've never really made buildings at all. But I was kind of good at math, but I was also kind of good at art. And choosing any other direction seemed to favor one or the other, but architecture seemed to offer a space in the middle. And once I started, I realized that actually the making of physical buildings in the world is fought with compromise.

16:20and buildings are expensive, they take a long time, which means that you're in the service of, unfortunately, those with the power and capital to employ you, which often means you're building trophies for despots and dictators in various countries around the world. And I moved away from those forms of traditional architecture, but really what I was fascinated by was this way to have a cultural and a technological conversation at the same time. You're very scathing about architects and the practice in a way, aren't you? I mean, you're suggesting there that, you know, the primary goal is to build some shiny museum for a despot.

16:53Although so many architects, they are working within the city structure and urban planning. And didn't you work for Zaha Hadid for a couple of years? I did work for Zaha, yeah. I mean, when I'm critical of the architecture profession, really I'm talking about what we define as the avant-garde or the bleeding edge of that profession. And the sorts of things that get popularized in magazines and celebrated in architecture press are these trophy museums or extraordinary houses for millionaires that they might live in for two weeks out of the year. And just to remind people, she was known particularly for those beautiful, sinuous, very futuristic, often looking buildings.

17:32Yeah, well, she originally was known for her art. And now it's a practice of 500 people churning out buildings all over the world. But when I was there, it was still a very boutique art-based practice, which was exciting and also kind of helped form this idea that you could have conversations about cities and architecture without making buildings. But I do want to acknowledge that there are extraordinary architects all over the world doing worthy and noble and wondrous things. They're just not often the sorts of architects that get documentaries made about them and books written about them. You talk about the people who are often called star architects.

18:08Exactly, starchitects. And thankfully, I think we're at the end of the era of starchitects in many ways. But those types of buildings required extraordinary scales of capital. And with that comes, you know, sometimes fairly contentious politics. And I didn't really want to be a part of that. So you always knew, even when you started working within the realm of architecture, that you didn't want to end up making buildings. It was more about making ideas. Yeah, exactly. That was my interest. And the types of architects I always admire were, from the British scene, were groups like Archigram in the 60s and 70s, who some of them have now gone on to make buildings.

18:46But at the time, Archigram, this merging of the word architecture and telegram, they were paper architects, what we would call them. And they would create images of future cities, like a giant city with legs that would nomadically roam across the planet. and they would present these images in these paper magazines, these zines that we would call them now. And I think you can make an argument that they had as much influence over the British architecture conversation and discipline as any architects that were making physical buildings at the time. Are you drawing a parallel between then and the 60s and the sort of thing you do now because they were being provocative?

19:26They were creating provocations rather than practical solutions. Exactly. I think speculation is something that designers have always done. You know, an archigram were operating post-war at a time when we were thinking about how we might rebuild. And British architecture at the time thought the response to that extraordinary moment of upheaval was building big, massive, permanent, weighty buildings that would resist time and conflict. but at the same time new technologies of plastic and new forms of rapid manufacturing meant that Archigram would embrace that model and say that actually what if a building was an airship that could drift into a city unfold like a flower exist for a moment pack itself up and then move on again so it was really trying to again create a counter-narrative against the dominant British architecture scene at the time just in the same way that with Planet City you're saying, yeah, we could all live in this city of 10 billion people all living on top of each other.

20:27Am I understanding it right, thinking that what you're saying is, yeah, you could do that. That's probably not what we want to do, but work your way back from that as a way of addressing some of the global problems, particularly to do with food supplies, climate change, impending ecological disaster. Yeah, I think the role of provocations is just to unsettle the narrative and shift the conversation a little bit. Like, at the moment, if we were to Google utopian future city, You know, we'd see trees on rooftops, we'd see like images of community gardens, very small scale local actions as a form of resistance against mega planetary scale corporations and so forth.

21:04And again, they're visions of the future that come out of a very particular model of environmentalism from the 60s and 70s. and maybe at the time we had a chance but we've long since blown past the scales of where those proposals would be possible and plausible and now we're in a point where we really need planetary scale systemic change but most of the images of planetary scale change we see in popular culture are dystopian the work of the bond villain or the evil mega corporation These are the narratives that we see in sci-fi today. So there's an urgency to reimagine what our futures look like, because I don't think we have any shared visions that we're actually trying to work towards, never mind putting in place policies that might get us there.

21:52So that's really the project of my work is to create these new planetary imaginaries as provocations to trying to engage audiences in a conversation about what kind of shared realities we want to be moving forward with.

22:12Your next choice for this cultural life, Liam Young, is the 1982 Ridley Scott movie Blade Runner. When did you first see it? I first saw it as a teenager, actually. I had a cyberpunk moment, and that prompted me to go back to the 1980s and to read William Gibson's Neuromancer, and then, of course, the icon of that movement, Blade Runner. And what was it about the film that made such a big impression on you? Was it the visual design or was it the story, the noir aspect? It's a couple of things. One is that it really is an icon of what we might describe as a practice of world building. I was fortunate enough to meet one of my heroes and mentors, Sid Mead, before he passed away.

22:57And he famously did a lot of the designing for Blade Runner. Originally, he was commissioned by Ridley Scott to design the vehicles of Blade Runner. but his approach was to say that I can't design the vehicle without imagining the street that that vehicle exists within. So he would do these amazing gouache paintings of the vehicle, but also of the streetscape. And they would become the defining images that would shape the vision of that film. The early days of what we would call world building, where you're not just designing an object, but you're designing the entire world that that object is set within.

23:30And I guess if you're designing the car, then you have to know the street, but if you know the street, then you have to imagine the city. And so it keeps getting bigger and bigger. And that's really the practice that I have now evolved into, is not designing singular objects or a costume or even a building, but rather thinking about the world that all those things exist within and the rules of that world. And then all of these objects are generated based on the rules of that environment. And Blade Runner, in fact, it's set in a future which we've already passed. Set in 2019, Los Angeles, yeah.

24:03Exactly. And we have a series of robots, off-world colonist robots that have gone rogue and returned back to Earth. But the story itself is based on the Philip K. Dick 1968 novel, I think, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? So were you aware of the book as well and the ideas, or was it just the movie itself? becoming a designer i was definitely interested in the visual world of the film but it sparked me to dive into the whole cultures of cyberpunk and cyberpunk literature as well so yes i was aware of the book but i was fascinated by the moment when that future was created in the 80s this is where we have the first walkman the first vhs video recorder everything cool is made in Japan.

24:45And we get the first glimpses of the world that we now occupy. And cyberpunk is the resistance to that moment. You know, the reason that you see like Japanese noodle bar neon glistening in the wet streets is because we were seeing the outsourcing of industry to Asia. And we're projecting this emerging superpower of Japan into the future. And Blade Runner is this hybridization of an American landscape, an American city, and a Japanese one. And obviously that future didn't come to pass. Japan had its own economic crisis and so on. But again, cyberpunk stands as this time capsule of the fears and anxieties of that moment.

25:25It's a time capsule of the first wave of resistance against the big technological superpowers that we're now governed by. And I was really interested in the birth of that hacker culture, you know the glimmers of the of what a pushback might look like hacker culture you mean if people are designing these systems there's always going to be people who are going to say i'm going to mess around with it exactly i'm going to find the back door exactly but you also see the beginnings of the thought that these systems are so large and complex that it's really going to be big mega corporations that are going to be structuring them so this reality that we live in today where Google, Apple, Amazon, Facebook or Meta, especially in America, you know, structure so much of the political conversation, the cultural and social conversation.

26:14Cyberpunk saw that coming. Again, it wasn't about prophecy, but it saw the trends emerging. And a lot of those films are warning signs. I think one of the great tragedies of the genre is that cyberpunk imagery has kind of become a placeholder for future. Blade Runner is now what, 45 years old or something. But I've got to say, when I first saw your film Planet City, my very first thought was, it's so Blade Runner. I mean, there are so many visual echoes of that film that's fed into your work. So you're absorbing it and you're still using that imagery. I mean, absorbing it, I'm hopefully reimagining it in the sense that, like, those futures were also predicting cities becoming more dense, you know, especially in the sequel that just came out.