Views of Planet City

For Getty’s PST ART: Art & Science Collide season SCI-Arc presents Views of Planet City——a group exhibition based on Liam Young’s transmedia project Planet City, a call for a radical re-envisioning of a sustainable planetary future. It opens Friday, September 13 in the SCI-Arc Gallery and Saturday, September 14 at the Pacific Design Center Gallery.

Views of Planet City is among more than 60 exhibitions and programs presented as part of PST ART—Getty’s landmark regional event that returns in September 2024 with the theme Art & Science Collide, exploring the intersections of art and science, both past and present. For more information, please visit pst.art.

Liam Young’s Planet City explores explores implications of Edward O. Wilson’s “Half-Earth” proposal to remove at least 50% of our planet’s land and marine areas from human use and set them aside for preservation and regeneration of ecosystems and biodiversity. In Young’s sci-fi vision, humanity has retreated into Planet City, a single city housing 10 billion people—the projected human population of Earth in 2050—surrendering most of the world to a global-scaled wilderness and the return of stolen lands.

Views of Planet City features new components of Young’s evolving body of work along with world premieres of interrelated projects by SCI-Arc faculty Jennifer Chen, John Cooper, Damjan Jovanovic, and Angelica Lorenzi. Critically and imaginatively exploring the implications of Planet City’s wildly speculative but plausible premise, Views of Planet City challenges dystopian visions of the future, offering both an immersive, interactive experience and a conceptual blueprint for a sustainably urbanized planet. A project of radical optimism driven by cinematic sensibility and architectural thinking, Views of Planet City conjures a new planetary imaginary for our age of urban transitions.

Works in the exhibition include films set within the city itself as well as those weaving the city’s histories from satellite surveys above, large scale movie miniature models and intimate interior occupations, participatory building workshops, costumes and masks evoking the intermingling of world cultures within the city, a video game simulation modelling the role that AI may play in supporting the recovery of planetary ecosystems, and ceremonial artefacts drawn from new rituals of nature, all set alongside the research and documentary material that undergirds this collective speculation. Staged within an exhibition architecture developed by OFICINA.LA, the exhibition presents a collaborative effort of multiple voices and cultures supported by an international team of acclaimed 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 explores how centuries of colonization, globalization, and never-ending economic extraction and expansionism could be reversed to solve climate change and the exploitation of both natural and human resources” says Young, who is also Coordinator of SCI-Arc’s groundbreaking Fiction and Entertainment postgraduate program.

Curated by Liam Young and organized by Namik Mackic, Views of Planet City will be presented simultaneously at two venues to reach audiences on LA’s east and west sides: the Pacific Design Center Gallery in the Cube (formerly operated by MOCA), and the SCI-Arc Gallery in the heart of the SCI-Arc campus in the Arts District, Downtown LA.