A new and star-studded immersive experience at London’s Barbican Centre invites us to explore “imagined futures for our planet, rooted in real technology and climate-based possibilities,” and imagine a better one. The voice of Diego Luna (Rogue One, Andor, Y tu mamá también) takes us out of everyday life with a prologue to In Other Worlds, created by designer, director, and producer Liam Young (Planet City), in collaboration with leading voices from film, TV, literature and science. And Luna’s voice also sends us back to it with an epilogue at the end of the interactive exhibition.
On the journey through six worlds, you can experience audio stories, displays of films on LED walls, tapestries, costumes, installations, soundscapes, huge-scale projections, as well as set design, movie miniatures and speculative artefacts. Among the other famous voices you can hear are those of Jeffrey Wright (American Fiction, Casino Royale), Maxine Peake (I Swear, Shameless), Adam Young (Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power), Denise Gough (Andor), Finnish actress Alma Pöysti (Fallen Leaves), Australian actress Natasha Wanganeen (Rabbit Proof Fence), space scientist and broadcaster Maggie Aderin (host of BBC’s Sky at Night) and actor and director Richard Ayoade (The Phoenician Scheme, The IT Crowd).
Writers behind the experience include Lisa Joy (Westworld, Fallout), Kim Stanley Robinson (The Ministry for the Future), Chen Qiufan (AI 2041), Jane Wu (Blue Eye Samurai) and AI scholar and artist Kate Crawford (Atlas of AI), with costumes by Ane Crabtree (The Handmaid’s Tale, The Sopranos, Westworld).
“Operating in the spaces between design, fiction and futures, these works immerse us in the consequences and opportunities of the decisions we make today,” explains a Barbican description of In Other Worlds. “It is about stepping away from dystopia, asking: what if the future could actually be… hopeful?”
And Young, whom the BBC has described as “the man designing our futures,” highlights: “The future doesn’t rush over us like water. It’s not something that happens to us. It’s an act of creation. It’s something we make, moment by moment, together.”
Adds Luke Kemp, head of creative programming, Barbican Immersive: “The immersive program at the Barbican is a place to explore some of the most important topics of our times that place the visitor at the heart of the experience. It is hugely exciting to be working with Liam Young and his collaborators on this major exhibition, as now is the time to once again look for new stories, imagine different futures and create the worlds that we want to exist, rather than the ones that are being created for us. These wondrous environments created with leading talents will take us closer to what the possibilities could be.”
Indeed, during a press preview of In Other Worlds on Thursday, Young highlighted that he and his creative collaborators wanted to showcase “speculative worlds that act as rehearsals for future, for the world to come.” And it may be his first U.K. solo exhibition, but he emphasized that, similarly to how in film the director may be a public face but not the only creative force, the experience at the Barbican could never have been completed without all his partners.
Among the ideas you come across during your immersive journey are the World Machine, Technoglomerates, or stones “forged from the raw materials of artificial intelligence,” a new Aboriginal space industry and Planet City, “a single city for the entire population of Earth,” meaning a metropolis for 10 billion people with 7,000 languages that is stacked in layers, while the rest of the planet returns to the wild. Despite its population density, Planet City is “full of hope, life, diversity and holidays, festivals, and carnivals,” Young offers. “Planet City becomes one giant party.”
Some of the worlds you get to experience may seem dark, but the creator wants to send visitors home with hope. “In Other Worlds is an attempt to create a collection of visions for a hopeful future,” Young highlights. “What we tried to do with the show was create an entry point to talk about what the future could be and to create a shared conversation. [It’s] a rallying cry or a call to arms to say the future at this point in time needs to be a project again in this very urgent and critical moment, where it sometimes feels very difficult to be hopeful about our future in many ways. That’s the project of our generation, I think – finding ways to be hopeful amidst the darkness.”
Similarly to how the exhibition is designed to break new ground in terms of immersive experiences and new ideas, it also takes visitors beyond the regular spaces of the Barbican to end in its car park, or parking garage. No boundaries for our imagination and ideas!
Indeed, the Barbican experience that In Other Worlds offers is “not a collection of solutions, but rather an attempt to reorientate us around new visions for a future that operate at planetary scales,” Young emphasizes. “A lot of the images you see are quite provocative or confrontational. They’re challenging in the sense that they don’t necessarily look like what we’re trained to think of as hopeful images of the future. There are no trees on rooftops or small-scale community gardens in Brooklyn. Instead, there are massive infrastructural works, large-scale geoengineering and atmospheric transformations. They are images that attempt to meet the scale of the moment.”
After all, “the crises that we face are no longer crises of technology, but rather crises of the imagination,” Young concludes. “It is the result of our own biases and blind spots, politics and prejudices. If we wanted to, we could wake up tomorrow and change everything about how we do the world, and that is a potentially really powerful place to be – on the cutting edge of the potential for change.”
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