Co-opting the “Hollywood Machine to Tell Different Kinds of Stories”: Liam Young on His Immersive Experience ‘In Other Worlds’

Welcome to a different kind of science fiction experience! Embark on a journey through six possible future worlds and engage with films, audio stories and soundscapes, installations and projections, costumes and tapestries, movie miniatures and speculative artefacts. This is In Other Worlds, an immersive experience created by designer, director, and producer Liam Young (Planet City), in collaboration with leading voices from film, TV, literature and science.

Hosted at London’s Barbican Centre, it features such famous voices as Diego Luna (Rogue One, Andor), Jeffrey Wright (American Fiction, Casino Royale), Denise Gough (Andor), Richard Ayoade (The Phoenician Scheme, The IT Crowd), Maxine Peake (I Swear, Shameless), Adam Young (Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power), Finnish actress Alma Pöysti (Fallen Leaves) and Australian actress Natasha Wanganeen (Rabbit Proof Fence).

The immersive exhibition invites you to explore “imagined futures for our planet, rooted in real technology and climate-based possibilities.”

Young and his collaborators offer a slice of Hollywood through the stories, the famous voices and writers, including Lisa Joy (Westworld, Fallout), and costumes by Ane Crabtree (The Handmaid’s Tale, The Sopranos, Westworld), among other things. But the immersive experience also wants to go beyond the traditional sci-fi offering.

“Our relationship to the future has always been shaped by the medium of imaginary worlds,” Young offered during a press walk-through for In Other Worlds, which runs through Sept. 6. “It’s an extraordinary shared language.” However, “one of the great tragedies of the Hollywood machine is that we often lose that opportunity … to find deep emotional connections to ideas through these mediums, rather than just create a backdrop for some superhero moment.”

He described In Other Worlds as “an attempt to create a collection of visions for a hopeful future, but also to bring general audiences into direct conversation with some of these ideas about how you might live in the future,” in effect, “creating an entry point to talk about what the future could be and creating a shared conversation.”

People walking through the immersive experience will get to see, hear and interact with different potential future worlds, each anchored by a film, developed by Young’s studio in Los Angeles and “an amazing group of VFX artists that, when they’re not working on these kinds of projects, is working on Hollywood blockbusters and Marvel movies,” Young explained. “So we’re kind of making an attempt to co-opt that Hollywood machine to tell different kinds of stories, and then out of those films are pulled costumes, props, objects, movie miniature models that go into the making of the film.”

Young is fascinated by and interested in the history of sci-fi worlds and model making, from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis to Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, he shared. “The unsung heroes of world-building, in many ways, have been model makers,” he said. “What we’ve done with these worlds is then also invite an amazing collection of collaborators, writers from film and TV, musicians, poets, scientists, and technologists to inhabit each of these worlds and to tell their own stories to find their own characters and to take their own position in these spaces.”

For visitors of In Other Worlds, Young hopes to provide inspiration for ways to address our world’s challenges. After all, the creative says, “the crises that we face are no longer crises of technology, but rather crises of the imagination.”