The unimaginable imagined: On geoengineering and Liam Young’s ‘Planetary Redesign’
Geo-engineering for carbon removal, a review of Liam Young’s ‘Planetary Redesign’ (2023), and a role for art, architecture, and speculative design in envisaging, sharing and articulating awkward possible futures
Ed. This is the ‘director’s cut’ of a review of Liam Young’s show ‘Planetary Redesign’ at the National Gallery of Victoria in 2023, an edit of which appeared in Architecture Australia, 11 September 2023.
“We would be wise to watch these jumpy artists as closely as budgerigars were watched down a coalmine. When they topple from the perch, it may already be too late to run for the lift-shaft. The sky will be transformed into an uncontained cloud of intelligence, the dream of a brain, a brain without a shell: shapeless shapes, impossible colours, the unimaginable imagined … These are the first seismic whispers. Soon it will be everywhere, overheard conversations with no human source. Soon we will all think it. And then it will happen.”
— Iain Sinclair, Bad News’, London Review of Books, 6 December 1990
Art helps us move ideas from the edges, conjuring that ‘unimaginable imagined’ as shared ‘seismic whispers’, slowly and then suddenly everywhere all at once. In a 2015 lecture for the BBC, Brian Eno described this role of art as both simulator and cultural timepiece. Eno said, “One of the things about art is it offers a safe place for you to have quite extreme and rather dangerous feelings. And the reason you can do that is because you know you can switch it off. So art has a kind of role there as a simulator. It offers you these simulated worlds… None of us are at all expert on everything that’s happening. So we need ways of keeping in synch, of remaining coherent. And I think that this is what culture is doing for us.”
Perhaps what Planetary Redesign, the recent Liam Young show at the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV), allows us to do is to thoughtfully encounter the extreme, to collectively imagine the unimaginable, and to begin to synchronise with the futures possibly ahead of us all.
The show also reveals that Liam Young may be one of the most intriguing Australian architects around, even though his work is highly unlikely to crop up at an Australian Institute of Architecture awards evening any time soon. Through film-making and installation, Planetary Redesign describes a quite different form of architecture to the mainstream, and embodies a quite different mode of standard architectural practice. Both are entirely valid extrusions of current understandings of discipline and outcome, feeling like exploratory creeping rootstalks moving through the same dark soil, yet looking to surface into a different light, to flower in a different way.
Talking with Young in Melbourne in early August 2023, his architectural roots show through clearly, his training evident in his techniques and vocabulary, as well as an ethical perspective allied to inventive capacity and an inquisitive re-framing of the world around. Indeed Young holds a regular teaching gig at SCI-Arc architecture school in Los Angeles, running the innovative MA in Fiction and Entertainment, in addition to his work as a filmmaker and speculative designer.
In an enthralling lecture — really a spoken-word performance narrating over the vast projections and rumbling soundtrack— for us at Melbourne School of Design at the University of Melbourne in late July 2023, he tells students that “architecture is telling stories with and through space,” describing his role as “science illustrator”, drawing blue-sky research out of the lab and painting it onto the dark skies which currently glower over us.
His “spatial narratives” are expressed in vivid cinematic installations rather than inert concrete, however. That it may ultimately be more affecting and impactful, in terms of articulating our climate and biodiversity crisis, than much other architecture is perhaps an inconvenient truth for the discipline, just as the particular spatial narratives he unfolds may be even more confronting for our mainstream understanding of what a genuinely sustainable future looks like.
To Eno’s point, you can watch these films and then simply walk out of the gallery. The films can take chances, as spatial and political simulators, that buildings cannot. The elegant fortress of the NGV can host these simulations, but cannot truly change its own form in response to the climate crisis.
Planetary Redesign, however, envelops us not only in the vivid light flooding the dark gallery but, momentarily at least, in experiencing a possible tomorrow. It leaves us to reflect on whether we — as designers — are taking our present day seriously enough, selecting our toolkit accordingly.
The show pivots around two major works, The Great Endeavour, direct from its world-premiere at the 2023 Venice Biennale of Architecture, and 2020’s acclaimed Planet City, commissioned for the NGV Triennial in 2020. Thematically-linked, both films adumbrate possible futures — planetary-scale systemic responses to planetary-scale systemic challenges — that we may need to reach for, at least in some way.
No matter how vividly-detailed both appear, however, they actually hover carefully and artfully between ambiguity and clarity, between tomorrow and today. African-American writer Samuel Delaney once remarked that “(There) are very few ‘ideas’ in science fiction. The resonance between an idea and a landscape is what it’s all about.” In a sense, Young’s films are actually sketches of awkward choices rather than material structures. Yet after Delaney, their ideas resonate due being made material and stretched over imagined landscapes.
‘The Great Endeavour’ imagines a global system of greenhouse gas extraction and storage machines, strung across oceans in international waters and powered by renewable energies, depicting the kind of brute-force un-civil engineering that may be required to extract the vast amounts of carbon that we have already put into the atmosphere.
This envisioning’s ‘sublime’ beauty is awful and awe-inspiring at the same time, just as deliberate ‘geo-engineering’ is highly uncomfortable and equally a possible salvation. Young tells me that he “uses the sublime as a reference point to dramatise and aestheticise infrastructure”, partly in order to “to involve the audience, make them part of the narrative”, by drawing them into these most complex of questions.
In this respect, Young explicitly references David Nye’s “technological sublime”, perhaps thinking of Nye’s statement in his Seven Sublimes that “confronted with the sublime, people commonly feel a sense of humility. These experiences of awe reduce self-interest and increase social cohesion. The sublime is a powerful individual moment, but it also has cultural effects, helping to hold groups together.”
Further, Nye suggests that “the history of the technological sublime is that of the movement from word to spectacle, from individual to crowd, from nature to the machine, from substance to electric image”, words that seem almost designed to underscore Young’s approach.
Some months after Young’s show, I was fortunate to be able to visit exhibitions with adjacent approaches: Re/Sisters: A Lens on Gender and Ecology at The Barbican in London and Our Ecology: Toward a Planetary Living at Mori Art Museum in Tokyo. Through different lenses, both shows revealed the long and recent histories of working the relationship between the sublime and environmentally-oriented artworks, whether the installation-based works of Kimura Tsunehisa, Nakaya Fujiko, Tonoshiki Tadashi or Nina Canell in Our Ecology, or the contemporary photographic works of ecological destruction at Re/Sisters, by Simryn Gill, Sim Chi Yin, Zoe Leonard, Chloe Dewe Mathews—or indeed Agnes Denes’s iconic Wheatfield–A Confrontation (1982).
Yet watching The Great Endeavour’s seaborne carbon removal infrastructure I also recall the late Jonathan Raban, perhaps the greatest writer about waters, seas, and oceans, who wrote specifically about ‘the sublime’ in the context of oceans. Raban wrote: “The sea will not be civilised…The water bunches and crumples…explodes in 40-foot plumes of powdered white… awful chasms, monstrous high hills. This is wilderness.”
Young places the infrastructure — reminding us that the word literally meaning the supporting structures beneath — of our civilisation directly in this ‘uncivilised wilderness’. His virtual camera moves slowly, descending towards those rolling crumples of water in order to hover at ship’s bridge height, the reality of the giant infrastructures at human-scale hove into view, and the ocean too, allowing us to feel what Raban describes as “the brushfire crackle of the breaking wave as it topples into foam; the inward suck of the tidal whirlpool; the loom of a big ocean swell, sinister and dark… the sheer abyssal depth of the water.” Placing the geoengineering infrastructure in this awe-inspiring context effectively doubles-down on sublimity, and thus perhaps reinforces the necessary humility we will need to confront these self-imposed challenges.
Further, Raban’s own “spatial storytelling” in his Passage to Juneau drew from the Kwakiutl indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest Coast and their understanding of the ocean as “a place”, a “mobile surface full of portents, clues and meanings”, as opposed to the Royal Navy’s surface reading of the same environment, as a mere blankness to be navigated through, an aqua nullius. This mirrors Tim Ingold’s similar description in his Lines (2007), juxtaposing Inuit readings of a place with the Royal Navy’s reading of the same thing as a canvas upon which to string together colonial ports; or rather, as Ingold has it, the distinction “between lines of seafaring and of shipping, or between life at sea and routing across it” (original emphasis). Could this implied shift in perspective help rescue the question of geoengineering from being yet another colonial project? What is the space between indigenous knowledge systems and ‘western’ technologies, in this context? Or perhaps even, in this respect, Young’s depiction of the ocean turbines of the Great Endeavour, with their own portents and clues, is actually a form of place-making—place in the Kwakiutl or Inuit sense—powerfully re-imagining that otherwise watered-down term?
Again, recalling Delaney, perhaps working with ‘place’ can take on new meanings by locating it within a strange shimmering resonance between ideas and landscape, projections of tomorrow and today’s weather reports.
Cultural technologies
Young’s Planet City (2020) is an earlier counterpart to Great Endeavour. It effectively shows the workings of biologist E.O. Wilson’s notion of a ‘Half-Earth’, in which half the planet is designated an essentially human-free natural reserve to preserve its biodiversity. Young draws out its corollary, a hyper-dense urbanisation in which the world’s population lives on only 0.02% of the earth’s surface. (Which helpfully puts today’s tiresome YIMBY-NIMBY debates into some kind of perspective.)
Depicting the city at dusk, the cityscape takes on the subdued hues of the Upside Down-ish Swedish suburbs of illustrator Simon Ståhlenhag. Yet as with Ståhlenhag, what immediately draws the eye forward from the backdrop of hulking machinery are the recognisable traces of humanity, flashes of culture. In his talk at Melbourne School of Design, Young suggests the city “smells of soil, hard drives, and sweet fruit”, evoking this interplay of culture, nature, and technology.
In Planet City, it is the mesmeric slo-mo figures, performing totemic rituals around the technologies. It’s these costumed figures that dance on my eyelids when I close my eyes to recall the film. Asked about the dancers, Young tells me that they’re evoking maintenance and care rituals, noting that “It’s impossible to separate technology and culture. We don’t evolve out of mythology”.
Expanding on this, Young describes the lovingly-detailed, re-embroidered Exxon and Shell uniforms produced for the film with costume designer Ane Crabtree, and exhibited here as part of Planetary Redesign. They indicate how the breadth of speculative design practice is well beyond any typical architecture commission. They are also essentially an embodiment of transition theory, metaphorically suggesting that newly emergent ‘regimes’ might be woven from the fabric of the incumbents.
Chatting with Young, it occurs to me that this position is in line with that of another Australian-via-California: Saul Griffith, and the clear statement in his compelling books Electrify and The Big Switch that we cannot demonise fossil fuel companies, even as we move radically and rapidly away from them. We will need their capital, skills, and technologies for this transition, even as we might help them locate their conscience. This is yet another uncomfortable truth for us to encounter in this show. That Young suggests all this with culture — costumes, scenery, rituals, soundtracks — folds in a subtlety and useful ambiguity into what is usually a highly binary opposition. As a result the work has a generative and participative openness, allowing for multiple forms of reflection and interpretation, multiple readings of the future.
We would do well to learn from this, no longer separating our institutions of culture from those of science and technology, whether in the academy, school, government, or everyday life. Ursula K. Le Guin wrote that “technology is the active human interface with the material world”, a definition that opens up a far richer way of thinking about technology than is typically imagine. As with all other architecture, Young’s films are partly about the reality of such ‘active human interfaces’, as culture and nature, and are therefore also about what this means, what this reveals about our societies.
Not proposals
Enriching the contextual research around the speculative, Young’s supporting films document how we are already geoengineering at vast scale — just unbelievably carelessly. Indeed, in her book Under a White Sky, Elizabeth Kolbert writes, “The issue, at this point, is not whether we’re going to alter nature, but to what end?”
Young’s footage of the Bayan Obo rare earth mine, Baotou refinery toxic lake, and the Chittagong ship-breaking yards is hard to stare down, not least because, deep down, we are already aware of the existence of what feminist geographer Val Plumwood called the ‘shadow places’ of the Global South, the vast distributed footprints of our own consumption. So far, the geoengineering has been to that end.
The documentaries of Young and crew arrive in the wake of a previous NGV commission, Richard Mosse’s immersive widescreen panorama Broken Spectre, documenting the destruction of the Amazon Rainforest. But Mosse, as an artist and filmmaker, produces work as a form of analysis and reflection, a mirror held up, whereas Young’s metier, as a designer and filmmaker, is synthesis.
Young is quick to distance the works from ‘proposals’ though, firmly removing any lazy and incorrect associations that Planet City is in the same mode as Bjarke ingels’ MasterPlanet or the NEOM atro-city projected across the Saudi desert. He clearly has little time for their hubris, characterising those schemes as the empty, unethical and self-serving tired ideas of “old white men”, entirely “in the service of capital”, a continuing colonisation. Indeed the now-infamous picture of Jean Nouvel, Peter Cook, Ben Van Berkel et al at the NEOM exhibition in Venice is a far more terrifying picture of the future than anything in Young’s work.
“‘Planet City’ and ‘Great Endeavour’ are not plans”, Young says, suggesting that, if anything, the films are intended to “corrupt our ideas about the future” rather than construct them.
Yet they pose very direct questions to us nonetheless. These do not concern which technologies are most relevant, what specific solutions must we back — but present a more complex question than most designers bother to imagine: How do we collectively organise to work at the scale and duration of the climate and biodiversity crisis?
So the real potency of Young’s films may lie in that which is not literally drawn, but implied. Perhaps we ought not to see them as blueprints of physical infrastructure, as assemblages of matter, but instead to read the work as an embodiment of the very different ‘dark matter’ of organisation, policy, law, collaborative decision-making culture, and coordination required for us to get our shit together at planetary scale. This dark matter is more fundamentally generative, yet we get to it by confronting and imagining the matter.
This is the “science illustrator” at work: the science says that the scale of action required can only exist in certain oceans, at particular confluences of environmental flows and global agreements. The illustrator recognises the power of the sublime to uncomfortably hold the attention on this reality.
Geoengineering: Endeavour and Derangement
In this, perhaps there’s a deep pragmatism to Young’s work. Again, not in the traditional terms of a proposed plan of action, but firstly by forcing us to recognise that “We’ve already been geoengineering for 300 years”, as he puts it. And secondly, in posing that insistently awkward question: What scale and speed of political, social and economic change will be required to reverse that process?
“We don’t talk about carbon removal”, Young states. “It’s the only robust viable solution, if it goes hand-in-hand with ending fossil fuel production”. And despite all the care taken with realising a detailed on-screen vision, the key question in his mind is who does this, as much as how.
Young holds our gaze uncomfortably on the reality of the situation: matchsticks propping open our eyes to the inconvenient truth that climate action may not simply be about citizen-led behaviour change OR large-scale geoengineering, but must probably be both/and.
Holly Jean Buck, an advisor on ‘The Great Endeavour’, is clear on this, in her book After Geoengineering: Climate Tragedy, Repair, and Restoration (2019):
“We, the workers and voters, will have to decide to force the removal of carbon from the atmosphere. And we should — those of us living in the global North, in particular … (D)oing carbon removal in a socially just and environmentally rigorous manner is not just morally desirable — it is actually a precondition for emissions going net negative.”
The position taken in After Geoengineering is that this work is simply “cleaning up our own mess”. So the question may not be “if?” or “why?” but “how?” Here, Young is clear that Arcadian vision of carbon removal, via mass reforestation, is probably too little, too late. Young bluntly points out that it is also too unlikely. “A simple change of government in Brazil could put the entire Amazon at risk”, he warns. (Indeed, currently many of our forests are transforming into carbon sources, not sinks.)
More broadly, Young thinks that a singular focus on individual responsibility to bear the work of carbon removal is not only unethical and unlikely to work, but reinforces the individualism, as a cultural lever within broader systems of capital, that produce the mess to be cleaned-up in the first place. He describes how “the fossil fuel industry has spent decades telling us to focus on our individual decisions whilst they continue to work at global scale.”
This is another inconvenient truth that Young’s work puts in front of us: the hard limits on individual action in the context of global capitalism. Holly Jean Buck files away small acts of carbon removal, like biochar at a farmers’ market, as “niche, boutique, aesthetic, or symbolic”.
The symbolic and the systemic
Yet “symbolic” is important, because symbols are. Acts at the community scale can prepare the ground for large-scale systems change, and vice versa. It’s clear that there is some relationship, no matter how tacit or loosely-coupled, between, say, the mass collective acts of Swedish people recycling 95% of their household waste via highly distributed neighbourhood-scale recycling centres and the ability to swing the Swedish government behind large-scale sustainable infrastructure and industry projects. Perhaps such cultures of decision-making indicate the potential for systems-scale collaboration rather than narrowly selfish competition, admitting that relatively few places work in such ways.
Young agrees that these symbolic or small-scale distributed moves are necessary too, and clearly believes in their potential efficacy — to a certain extent. But he also gently, if firmly, points out to me that there is very little evidence of contemporary human societies heading in this direction at all. And either way, we will still need to actively remove the greenhouse gases already in our atmosphere in order to prevent the spiralling tipping points of global heating.
Planetary Redesign does not dwell on the detail of small-scale behaviour change but Young recognises the necessity of these multiple nested moves. It’s just that he sees the “community gardens in Brooklyn, or not eating burgers” could equally be no more than a distraction.
Rebecca Solnit, however, sees geoengineering as the distraction, “beloved by technocrats, apparently because they can imagine big, centralised technological innovation, but not the impact of countless small, localised changes.” Amitav Ghosh, in his The Nutmeg’s Curse (2021), describes this not as ‘love’ but hopeless belief, a “magical thinking … now enshrined in the Paris Agreement” that “a new technology for removing vast amounts of carbon from the atmosphere will magically appear in the not-too-distant future.”
Young’s films are important as they actually allow us to rehearse a third position: planetary technologies that require collective organisation at that scale, but within complex forms of diverse folk cultures that technocrats cannot imagine. His films help us dwell in these ideas, examples of Eno’s simulators with which we can find our own position on the shared terrain between Buck’s and Solnit’s views.
Perhaps it is no coincidence that the title of The Great Endeavour echoes that of Ghosh’s The Great Derangement. For Ghosh, this ‘derangement’ includes a failure of our art and culture to prepare us for “a substantially altered world”, engaging instead in “modes of concealment that prevented people from recognizing the realities of their plight”. This may be broadly true, but Young, at least, is not holding back from describing these “altered worlds”.
Noting that science fiction is always about now, not then, we touch on contemporary Australia, as a place defined by one of the world’s largest geoengineering efforts, forever oriented around minerals, agriculture, and construction, each of which degrade our atmosphere, landscapes, and biodiversity at shocking scale. Australia’s incredibly simplistic economy languishes fifty places below any other OECD country, towards the bottom of Harvard University’s Atlas of Economic Complexity. Young characterises it as “the quarry of the world … where we dig up sacred indigenous landscapes to build China”.
Yet Young also reflects on Australia’s potential facility with systems, even if that is currently bound tightly to extraction, such as the vast largely-robotic trucks that crawl across those sacred landscapes in search of further chunks of rare earth. Could these economic engines be redirected? Indeed, the Northern Territory is also the proposed site of the SunCable proposal, the world’s largest renewable energy infrastructure project. There is little sign of any meaningful shift amongst Australian policymakers in this direction, however, or even much evidence of an active imagination. Elsewhere, Young notes that the Large Hadron Collider and the Atacama Desert radio telescope array are indeed systems built at societal scale, and formed of international agreement as much as building materials.
We might level a criticism that this emphasis on the ‘how’ and ‘who’ of global systems-scale collaboration is only largely implicit in Young’s work, beyond the delicately-hacked costumes, the sheer heft of the architecture. Writers like Kim Stanley Robinson, with his Ministry for the Future (2020), take care to sketch out the possible mechanics of these organisations: Who’s involved? How would it work? Who does what? Which disciplines?
(Aside: Tellingly perhaps, the disciplines of architecture and design do not have a seat at the table in Robinson’s ‘Ministry…’, amidst the other disciplines. As a sector, we should probably reflect on that.)
The corollary of this, however, is the equal and opposite failing of Robinson’s book. Beyond the easy jibe that it is a novel largely composed of meeting minutes, ‘Ministry…’ rarely makes the altered worlds come alive in a tangible sense, barely sketching the spatial narratives that would help us imagine what a world, post-Ministry, would be like to actually live in. Where Young and Solnit might perhaps agree is in the latter’s prognosis that we are suffering from “a sad failure of imagination at the heart of this crisis”.
This is where the likes of Young step in, exploring a new kind of architecture, not so much through in its literal materiality and tectonics — though there is that — but through its mode of engagement.
Using media places Young alongside other visionary urban designers at this point, few of which are recognised as being in the stolid-sounding ‘built environment industry’. These include the African-American production designer Hannah Beachler and the Brooklyn-based Nigerian visual artist Olelakan Jeyifous.
Jeyifous’s work includes visions of a ‘protopian Brooklyn’ or an oily, semi-submerged Niger Delta, and now the ‘African Conservation Effort/All-Africa Protoport’ installation at the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale, which evokes an alternate history of post-independence Africa, similarly addressing vast renewable energy infrastructures and biodiversity reserves, though via advanced indigenous Afro-Futurist technologies.
Beachler, talking about her direction for the world-building that so vividly realised the fictional city of Wakanda in the ‘Black Panther’ films, said “It’s about community. It’s about family. It’s about kids. It’s about rituals, spirituality, the things that you don’t see in normal futurescapes.” (from ‘Design in a frame of emotion’, Hannah Beachler with Jacqueline Stewart and Toni L. Griffin, 2020, Harvard GSD/Sternberg Press)
This is the potential of this work, common to both speculative design and service design, which we might draw from more broadly in the design practices of the built and living environment. Whilst the world-building of Young, Beachler and Jeyifous can be richly textured, they also draw the audience in to imagine the blueprints of hard and soft infrastructures, ‘tweening the frames between matter and dark matter, by foregrounding the culture of these places.
(An aside: Beachler is the daughter of an architect, before graduating in fashion design, whilst Jeyifous, like Young, is an architecture graduate. None are practicing architecture as traditionally understood.)
Young’s films, as with Beachler’s and Jeyifous’s, are open, generative, and provocative acts of cultural invention, “altered worlds” that come alive in that shimmering resonance between landscapes and ideas. All have an adaptive ‘used universe’ sensibility which Young invokes when he recalls William Gibson’s famous line, “The street finds its own use for things” in our interview.
Recalling Sinclair’s quote from 1990 that I opened with—which, incidentally, was the first mention of climate change in the London Review of Books—Planetary Redesign is indeed “the unimaginable imagined”, asking us to start sharing “seismic whispers” outside of the gallery, and synchronise our feelings about what it implies, what we should infer, how anything like this might work, and what that might mean. Liam Young’s work reveals that this is a key part of the designer’s role, as with that filmmaker or artist: to reveal and reframe the salient questions of today and tomorrow, articulating them in an openly generative way, such that they can be picked up and worked upon. It is up to all of us to find our own use for them.
Ed. Huge thanks to Liam for taking the time to have this discussion whilst his show was being installed down the road, and for his subsequent lecture to our students and staff at Melbourne School of Design at the University of Melbourne. This is the ‘director’s cut’ of a review of Liam Young’s show ‘Planetary Redesign’ at the National Gallery of Victoria in 2023, an edit of which appeared in Architecture Australia, 11 September 2023.
