Architects and designers often try to imagine what the city of the future will look like. Australian film director and speculative architect Liam Young tried to present his vision in a 15-minute animated short film.
Entitled "Planet City", the film takes us to a hyper-dense sustainable vertical city where 10 billion humans - the projected population of the earth in 2050 - live.
This is the place where humanity has decided to retreat while nature takes back its spaces and returns to thrive, reversing in this way the apocalyptic climate change.
In this mega-metropolis people live in towering conglomerates of houses or skyscrapers made from recycled materials, some of them are 165 storeys tall and they are powered with renewable energy sources (there are 49,445,671,570 solar panels in the city). Food is grown in vertical orchards and indoor mega-farms and 2,357 algae farms filter pollution and provide supplementary food.
A non-stop planetary festival, a 365-day procession, moves through the city, combining together important celebrations held by different cultures throughout the year.
Young also presented some of the inhabitants of this city and collaborated with very special costume designers to develop their wardrobes.
Costume artists Holly McQuillian, Karin Peterson and Kathryn Walters made the costumes for the Zero Waste Weavers, a group of inhabitants who wear long woven robes and trousers almost fully constructed on a loom and crocheted masks that seem assembled from a variety of leftover yarns.
Aneesa Shami designed the costume for the High Altitude Bot Herder, a shaman-like figure wearing trousers made of textile scraps and a horned headdress, while Courtney Mitchell made the Beekeeper costume that combines Oriental moods, the extravagance of Haute Couture and functional and protective wear.
Among the collaborators for this project there are also The Handmaid's Tale costume designer, Ane Crabtree, who acted as film producer and costume director, and architectural fashion designer Yeohlee Teng.
Crabtree co-ordinated the work on the costumes for the Nomadic Worker (a blue uniform inspired by Oriental garments with a headdress similar to the vintage helmets of Japanese firefighters - remember that ensemble by Kansai Yamamoto with a red headdress?), the Algae Divers, dressed in ample designs made according to a strict zero waste principle developed by Holly McQuillian, Karin Peterson, Kathryn Walters, and the Drone Shepherd, a character wearing a buffalo headdress, a reference to spirit animal powers.
Yeohlee Teng designed the costume for the Code Talker, inspired by morse code and Teng's Resort 19 collection with a headdress reminiscent of a porcupine.
Young crosses cultures, disciplines and traditional divides through his films and previously developed other projects that featured futuristic costumes: in "Where the City Can't See", a narrative fiction film captured entirely with laser scanners and shot with the same scanning technologies used by autonomous vehicles, Young told the story of a group of car factory workers who at night, adorned in machine vision camouflage and anti-facial recognition masks, try to escape the city by hacking it and searching for a place they know exists but that their car doesn't recognize.
These characters wear a series of LIDAR scanner camouflage costumes made with algorithmic textile patterns developed on computerized silk looms. The costumes create glitches and distortions when captured using the laser scanning technology that driverless cars use to navigate and map the world. The reflective silk and synthetic threads scatter laser light and render the body as a distortion within the data set.
Though speculative, Young's "Planet City" is based on real calculations and research: the director collaborated indeed with scientists, theorists, economists and even a NASA microbiologist (designing closed-loop waste systems for the future of Mars colonies) to develop it.
For this film Young was inspired by the concept developed by biologist E.O. Wilson in his essay "Half-Earth: Our Planet's Fight for Life" which proposes that mass extinction can be averted by dedicating half of the surface of the earth to nature. According to Young, "Planet City" could actually occupy as little as 0.02% of the earth, roughly the size of an average US state. The project is also conceived as a provocation that, Young hopes, may prompt debates and discussions not just about the environment, but about citizenship and national identities, something that would be abolished by the multiplicity of cultures living together in the same city.
Conceived as a work of critical architecture rather than just techno-utopian fantasy with the allure of a video game, "Planet City" was commissioned by the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) for the NGV Triennial 2020.
The Planet City project is accompanied by a book edited by Andrew Mackenzie, with Charles Rice and Mark Campbell, featuring original short stories set within the city by Kim Stanley Robinson, Qifan Chen, Nalo Hopkinson, Ryan Griffen and XIA JIA and original non-fiction essays by Benjamin Bratton, Holly Gene Buck, Saskia Sassen, Ashley Dawson, Giorgos Kallis, Ewan McEoin, Amaia Sanchez-Velasco and Andrew Toland. The book is available for international shipping from the NGV Bookshop.
PLANET CITY_EXCERPT from liam young on Vimeo.
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