Liam Young

Above a council estate tower block in London a network of surveillance drones monitor the residents below. Through the eyes of the drones two teenagers are kept apart, each held by police order within the digital confines of their own tower. In this near future city drones form agents of state surveillance but also become co-opted as the aerial vehicles through which two teens fall in love.

Based around the 20's avante garde cinema genre of the City Symphony, Seoul City Machine is a filmic poem for the urban landscape of tomorrow. The film is a portrait of a city where machines and technology are now the dominant inhabitants of space. Our guide to the city is the disembodied voice of its urban operating system software. Scripted and narrated by an AI chatbot the city machine voices its own creation story and explains itself to the citizens it affectionately manages.

A research and design project that imagines the future of post-human spaces like Google data centers and Amazon warehouses. Using the same artificial intelligence code that organizes logistics infrastructure, a fictional fulfillment center at the scale of a city has been procedurally generated. Things City is designed to accommodate only delivery drones, logistics bots, and packages as its citizens. Through the eyes of the city’s machines, we watch as a girl enters Things City on Valentine’s day searching for a lost package.

“Ferenj” is an afrosurreal dreamscape crafted from the director’s reconstructed memories questioning the meaning of home and identity as a mixed-race, Ethiopian-American growing up amidst cultural dissonance. The viewer is guided through fragments of Empress Taytu (her parents’ Ethiopian restaurant in Cleveland, OH) to the streets of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia by a speculative one-way conversation between the narrator and Empress Taytu – the restaurant personified as the historic empress. “Ferenj” harnesses photogrammetry as a tool to reclaim the 3D scanned spaces and redefine Robson’s relationship to them on her own terms.

A group of young factory workers are drifting through Detroit in a driverless taxi. They are part of an underground community that adorn themselves in digital camouflage to enact their escapist fantasies in the hidden spaces of the city.

What does a hopeful future look like? In our world of climate disasters and political crises, it is difficult to imagine. Artist Liam Young and actress Natasha Wanganeen (Rabbit-Proof Fence) sketch a solarpunk-like alternative timeline in which the fossil fuel industry has been dismantled and, on its ruins, a sustainable and inclusive society has been built by Indigenous people.

The entire population of the earth could live in a giant city occupying a fraction of the Earth’s surface, freeing the rest of the world for rewilding and return of stolen lands, according to a new movie by architect Liam Young. Young’s fictional Planet City movie proposes a hyper-dense metropolis housing 10-billion people that could be built on 0.02 per cent of the planet.