Join speculative architect Liam Young and an all-seeing smart city operating system as they ride along in a driverless taxi on a storytelling tour through a network of software systems, autonomous infrastructures, ghost architectures, anomalies, glitches and sprites, searching for the wilds beyond the machine. This performance is an audio-visual expedition to a city found somewhere between the present and the predicted, the real and the imagined, stitched together from fragments of real landscapes and designed urban fictions.
Commissioned by the Chicago Architecture Biennial, "Hello, City!" is a live cinema performance of Where the City Can’t See, the world’s first fiction film made entirely from data (directed by Liam Young and written by fiction author Tim Maughan). Spoken word, multiscreen projections, dancers, voice artists and live musical accompaniment from Aneek Thapar - Sonic Artist/Ninja Tune featuring tracks by KILN and Kill Memory Crash all combine to breathe life into this near-future Detroit. The computer vision systems of Google Maps, urban management systems, and CCTV surveillance are now fundamentally reshaping urban experience and the cultures of our city. Set in the Chinese-owned and -controlled Detroit Economic Zone (DEZ) and shot using laser scanners, the film presents this near-future city through the eyes of the robots that manage it.
Doors open at 6:30pm. Biennial galleries will remain open 6-9pm.
To attend, RSVP Here.
Liam Young is Founder of the urban futures think tank Tomorrows Thoughts Today (TTT), a group whose work explores the possibilities of fantastic, perverse, and imaginary urbanisms. With TTT, he has consulted and conducted workshops on speculation, emerging technologies, and future forecasting for firms in a wide range of industries. Young takes a collaborative approach to develop fictional speculations as critical instruments to survey the consequences of emerging environmental and technological futures. His projects include Under Tomorrows Sky, a movie set for a fictional future city developed through collaborations with scientists and technologists, and Electronic Countermeasures, a swarm of quadcopter drones that drift through the city broadcasting a pirate Internet and file-sharing hub. He also runs the Unknown Fields Division, an award-winning nomadic workshop that takes annual expeditions to the ends of the earth to investigate unreal and forgotten landscapes, alien terrains, and industrial ecologies. Young coordinates events and exhibitions including the multimedia seriesThrilling Wonder Stories: Speculative Futures for an Alternate Present and was a curator of the 2013 Lisbon Architecture Triennale. He has been acclaimed in both mainstream and architectural media and was named by Blueprint as one of 25 people who will change architecture and design.
