Liam Young: Planetary Civics & Planetary Imagination

About this event

The second Planetary Civics seminar for 2024, as part of the ongoing collaboration between RMIT and Dark Matter Labs on the Planetary Civics Initiative, brings renowned worldbuilder, designer, director and producer Liam Young to RMIT to discuss Planetary Imagination and the role of creative practice in envisaging fictions, futures, and a new ‘civics’ in a time of climate crisis.

Young visualizes the cities, spaces and props of our imaginary futures for the film and television industry. His own films have premiered with SxSW, the New York Metropolitan Museum, The Royal Academy, Venice Biennale, the BBC and the Guardian. His films have been collected internationally by museums such as MoMA New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and the NGV, and have been acclaimed in both mainstream and design media.

Young’s film work is informed by his academic research and he has held guest professorships at Princeton University, MIT, and Cambridge and now runs the ground breaking 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.

On this occasion Young will be in dialogue with Professor Alisa Andrasek of the RMIT School of Architecture and Urban Design, and Dr. Sarah Barns, Senior VCRF and digital humanist. Prof Naomi Stead will introduce the seminar and speak to the Planetary Civics initiative and its scope of work. 

The format will be Q&A, with an opportunity for questions and discussions with the audience.

About the participants

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.

Alisa Andrasek is a Professor of Architecture and Urban Design at RMIT. Her work, spanning research and practice, is future-oriented at the intersection of complex systems, computation and architecture. She is the founder of AIARCH and Biothing, and co-founder of Bloom Games and AI Build.

Sarah Barns is convenor of the Planetary Civics seminar series. Sarah is a Senior VCRF based at the Centre for Urban Research at RMIT, and a practising public artist and digital humanist. 

Naomi Stead is Director of the RMIT Design and Creative Practice Enabling Impact Platform, and part of the leadership group of the Planetary Civics Initiative, alongside Professor Tim Marshall, Professor Wendy Steele, and others. 

This seminar is part of the Planetary Civics seminar series, curated by Dr Sarah Barns and Professor Naomi Stead, in support of the Planetary Civics initiative which is a collaboration between the College of Design and Social Context at RMIT, and Dark Matter Labs. The series is supported by the Design and Creative Practice and the Urban Futures Enabling Impact Platforms.

Date: Tuesday, 14 May 2024

Time: 5.30pm - 6.30pm

Venue: Design Hub, Building 100, Level 3 (Street Level) 100.03.001, 150 Victoria St, Carlton VIC 3000

All are welcome! 

This event is brought to you by Design and Creative Practice, Enabling Impacts Platform.