“Crises of the imagination”: In Other Worlds at the Barbican is a sci-fi-fulled blueprint for surviving the end of the world
The star-studded new exhibition offers speculative if pragmatic possible solutions to the very real problems of today
“We’re all fucked.”
That was my initial reaction to In Other Worlds, the new future-gazing exhibition from artist and film maker Liam Young, running through May until September 6th at London’s Barbican Centre.
A journey through six speculative worlds that each offer a different take on the humanity-ending problems faced by society today, it mixes film, storytelling, fashion, model-making and documentary to force visitors to confront the inevitable end of life-as-we-know-it, as driven by mass consumerism, climate change and corporate indifference.
From ‘e-waste miners’ to ‘drone shepherds’ living in the world’s sole 10 billion-inhabitant super-city, In Other Worlds isn’t interested in high-rise green spaces, or ‘one tree planted for every X,Y,Z regret’. It’s survival as a form of protest, architectures of the future through a science-punk prism — Greta Thunberg by way of Mad Max.
“Our relationship to the future has always been shaped by the medium of imaginary worlds,” Young said at a preview of the show.
“These science fiction imaginaries have been sites where we can prototype and rehearse ideas about who we are and who we might want to be in the future. Rather than just forms of escape or decoration, in this way fiction operates as a form of infrastructure.
“In Other Worlds is an attempt to create a collection of visions for a hopeful future, but also to bring through these mediums, which are quite accessible, general audiences into direct conversation with some of these ideas about how you might live in the future.”
It’s a star-studded exhibition, pulling together collaborations with luminaries from the worlds of literature, cinema, design, and other disciplines. There’s an introduction by Diego Luna of Star Wars: Andor fame; there’s a story from Lisa Joy who brought the Westworld and Fallout TV shows to our screens; there are costumes from Emmy-nominated designer Ane Crabtree (The Handmaid’s Tale, Sopranos); Richard Ayoade (Submarine, The Mandalorian) and Jeffrey Wright (American Fiction, The Batman) narrate stories; and much more.
There's striking imagery throughout, both visual and literary. One story snippet sees a whale swimming through the flooded ruins of an AI data centre, presided over by a blind caretaker whose time within its pitch-black caverns has negated the need for sight. An animated timelapse "spanning 50,000 years" imagines the indigenous people of Australia recycling the ruins of oil rigs as the foundations of the reefs of the future, and the nuclear test beds of the desert repurposed as space-faring monuments to aboriginal culture.
And there's nods to the short-sightedness of today's xenophobic and nationalistic rise, too: yes, a city of 10 billion people might be more than a little cramped, but it'd also be a 365, 24/7 party zone, as the annual cultural festivities of the different amassed peoples overlap, resulting in a never-ending carnival of processions and celebrations.
On a more prosaic, practical note, be prepared to wait around a bit to listen to all the amazing story extracts on show. They’re littered around the exhibition space, each tied to their own corded headphone set, and with each extract lasting several minutes, anticipate queues to hear each one. A few QR codes dotted around so people can listen via their own headphones wouldn’t have gone amiss.
As you come towards the show’s close you’re confronted with a 360-degree projection space that offers perhaps the most stark reality of the mountain to be climbed for us all to survive. The video surrounds you with a vast ocean, from which rises a carbon capturing machine the size of a small town. The good news? These things sorta actually exist! The bad news? We’d need one for every oil rig and refinery in the world just to break even with current carbon output.
“This show is not a collection of solutions, but rather it's an attempt to re-orientate us around new visions for a future that operate at planetary scales,” says Young.
“The crises that we face, they're no longer crises of technology, but rather they're crises of the imagination.”
It’s a line delivered not with doomsday didactism, but hopefulness — through the curation of the show Young’s been left with the feeling that the human imagination remains a super-weapon against any unavoidable collapse.
I, then, left In Other Worlds with a slightly different thought in my head than my first knee-jerked reaction:
“We’re all fucked. Good?”
There’s a shocking pragmatism to In Other Worlds' take on the future. Yes, we’ve made a mess of things and, sadly, honestly, deservingly, it’s probably too late to turn back the tide of destruction we’ve wrought. But it’s not defeatist — the future may not be what we had hoped for, but it’s still ours to shape.
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