Live Cinema Event: New Planetary Imaginaries, by Liam Young (Unknown Fields) (After Digitalism sub-theme)
Following centuries of colonization, globalization, and never-ending economic extraction, we have remade the world from the scale of the cell to the tectonic plate. Science fiction dystopias, once read as speculative cautionary tales, are now the stage sets of the everyday, as many of us live out a disaster film in real time. In this seemingly futureless moment, New Planetary Imaginaries ventures beyond the familiar horizons of catastrophe to ask what other stories might be written into the fabric of the Earth.
A sci-fi safari through possible tomorrows, the journey moves across imagined planets and speculative civilizations, cities that gather billions into a single landscape, machines that draw carbon from the atmosphere, oceans cultivated as forests, abandoned infrastructures returned to wildness, and new forms of energy, ecology and planetary engineering. Each world is a fiction, but each begins with a question that belongs to the present. What if we could remake the systems that have remade us? What might a different relationship with the Earth look like? What new urban forms, myths and infrastructures might emerge from the ruins of the old?
Presented as a live cinema event, the stories unfold through a collision of live narration, moving image and sound, carrying the audience between documentary and dream, evidence and prophecy, the world we have inherited and the worlds we might yet build.