Liam Young – Senses and Sensibilities
“Fiction is an extraordinary shared language.” Fiction is a product of culture but it also produces culture: it impacts how we see the world. The line between fiction and reality is a thin one, and the urban space is one where our imaginaries are often played out. Through his piece ‘The Planet City’, Liam Young takes us on a cinematic drift through imaginary worlds: one fictional, one we are currently living in. What if we stepped back, made room and let global wilderness return? How do these fictional worlds we construct portray our technological possibilities and our gravest concerns? As already inhabitants of a planet city, we have remade the world. A new kind of story is needed to guide us into the future. We need to visualise our collective futures. We need to shape where we all want to go next. By telling the fictive story we get the chance to imagine a possible future, and by doing so, giving us the opportunity to imagine a new story for the planet: “As we write stories we also write the world.”
