Imagine the world where 10 billion people agree to all live in one, very condensed city in order to allow the planet to rejuvenate itself. That’s the concept behind Liam’s Young’s “Planet City” where the artist has been investigating the implications of biologist Edward O. Wilson’s “Half-Earth” proposal for biodiversity.
Liam Young – photo courtesy Sci-Arc
Still evolving, this September 13th, Views of Planet City brings together five artists with an investigation of their own. Presented by Getty, the exhibit presents an exploration of Liam Young’s Planet City, once again calling attention to the concept of a future city into which all of Earth’s human population has retreated and the return of the stolen lands.
Alongside Young, Jennifer Chen, John Cooper, Damjan Jovanovic, and Angelica Lorenzi construct a maze of perspectives on Planet City, examining it as a material phenomenon and a cultural event already in a process of becoming.
Spanning fiction and documentary films, video games, costumes, textiles, miniature models, installation, performance, and printed matter, Views of Planet City expands on Young’s imaginary world across a multiplicity of media to call for a radical re-envisioning of our common planetary future.
Cityscapes reassembled to extreme density and multicultural vigor, dramatically reconfigured landscapes of production, synthetic ecosystems at a planetary scale, new social practices of recycling and scavenging from existing cities, and practices of communing with a planet in the process of rewilding: Views of Planet City weaves a vibrant image from trends and technologies already emerging in our present.
The exhibition represents a collaborative effort of multiple voices and cultures supported by an international team of groundbreaking environmental scientists, theorists, and advisors. In Views of Planet City, we see that adequate responses to climate change no longer constitute a technological problem, but rather an ideological one, rooted in culture and politics.
Views of Planet City is a collective contemplation of choices and sacrifices humanity must make to cut the footprint of urbanization and confront global warming at the most daunting of scales. It proposes nothing less than a new planetary imaginary: a counterimage of sustainability that flies in the face of the dated environmentalist visions of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Both an immersive, interactive experience and a conceptual blueprint for a sustainably urbanized planet, Views of Planet City is a project of radical optimism driven by cinematic sensibility and architectural thinking.
Views of Planet City is exhibited across two venues, the SCI-Arc Gallery and the Pacific Design Center. Opening SCI-Arc Gallery: Friday, September 13, 6-8pm and at Pacific Design Center Gallery: Saturday, September 14, 3-5pm. www.sci-arc.edu
