Artwork caption: Planet Garden v.1 screenshot, early game state, 2023, Damjan Jovanovic. Video Game screenshot. Courtesy of the artist. ©Damjan Jovanovic.
Views of Planet City - Visions of the Future
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Visions of the Future

A Curatorial Perspective on Two Objects

Liam Young's Planet City and Damjan Jovanovic's Planet Garden both investigate a scenario, inspired by biologist E.O. Wilson's Half-Earth hypothesis, in which humanity has reached a global consensus to retreat from its vast network of cities and supply chains into one single megalopolis, leaving the remainder of the Earth to regenerate. While Young's world building project belongs in the genre of speculative design, Jovanovic works in the field of software and game design.

Young's Planet City breaks away from science fiction’s traditionally dystopic depictions of the future, depicting instead a vibrant, celebratory co-mingling of the planet’s cultural diversity. His Planet City is based on already existing or currently emerging technologies—technologies that promise to radically reconfigure urban infrastructures and replace those productive landscapes that support urban life with something more efficient, more sustainable, and more integrated in the urban fabric.

Jovanovic's self-playing game is a nonlinear narrative that invites active participation from the audience, where players are put in the role of stewards of a vast metropolis, having to navigate a delicate balance between urban life and ecosystems preservation. In Jovanovic's game, Planet City is built through an ongoing process of collective reconfiguration where the players, aided by an advanced conversational AI, are tasked with making choices that will sustain the coexistence of natural and urban worlds.

Both artists are originally trained as architects, thus their two works may be said to represent two examples of "architectural futures"—architecture's own contributions to the fields of strategic foresight and futures research. On a more granular level, the technologies referenced in Young's film and the ideas that suffuse Jovanovic's game both point to technical and cultural objects that are virtually existent, though not necessarily fully realized or widely implemented in our world. In that sense, the two works represent two instances of what may be termed "virtual architecture:" a way of thinking spatially about structures that are already formed or forming in our present, with a certain degree of likelihood to reach some kind of realization in the future.

Exhibition page. 

SCI-Arc (Southern California Institute of Architecture)

350 Merrick Street, Downtown Los Angeles, Los Angeles

MON-FRI: 10am-6pm
SAT-SUN: 12 - 6pm

A digital image of pale pink neon strobe lights shooting across a dense cityscape.
Still image from "The Vertical Farms of Planet City," 2023, Liam Young. Designed and Directed by Liam Young, VFX supervisor Alexey Marfin, Costume Producer Ane Crabtree. ©Liam Young.
Still image from "The Vertical Farms of Planet City," 2023, Liam Young. Designed and Directed by Liam Young, VFX supervisor Alexey Marfin, Costume Producer Ane Crabtree. ©Liam Young.
Artwork caption: Planet Garden v.1 screenshot, early game state, 2023, Damjan Jovanovic. Video Game screenshot. Courtesy of the artist. ©Damjan Jovanovic.
Artwork caption: Planet Garden v.1 screenshot, early game state, 2023, Damjan Jovanovic. Video Game screenshot. Courtesy of the artist. ©Damjan Jovanovic.
Artwork caption: Planet Garden v.1 screenshot, early game state, 2023, Damjan Jovanovic. Video Game screenshot. Courtesy of the artist. ©Damjan Jovanovic.

Discussion Questions

  • What kinds of lense/theoretical or historical perspective would you use to discuss Planet City as a hypothesis—and as a proposal for humanity's future?

  • How does each of the artists create a framework that allows them to speculate coherently about the future?

  • What kinds of tools and strategies do the artists use to capture and engage the audience?

  • How important is the choice of format/medium for the information that each of the artworks seeks to convey?

  • How do the two different formats differ in terms of the propositions they are able to make regarding the future?

  • How do these works, and the rest of the works exhibited in this show, align, and in what aspects do they diverge, as parts of a "vision of the future"?

Bibliographic References

Liam Young, "Planet City — a Sci-Fi Vision of an Astonishing Regenerative Future", TED Talk, November 29, 2021https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AX4ewS-YIbA
Damjan Jovanovic, "Planet Garden — a Terraforming Simulation Game, Developed in the Games and Worldmaking seminar at SCI-Arc," Accessed August 7, 2023https://worldmaking.xyz/Planet+Garden/Planet+Garden
Wilson, Edward O. Half-Earth: Our Planet’s Fight for Life. New York, W. W. Norton & Company, 2016 Gualeni, Stefano.https://wwnorton.com/books/9781631492525
Virtual Worlds as Philosophical Tools: How to Philosophize with a Digital Hammer. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire; New York, NY, Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.https://philpapers.org/rec/GUAVWA