Planet City: Ryan Griffen and Liam Young

Hosted by Dr Alex Brown, architect and senior lecturer, Department of Architecture, Monash University

Indigenous writer and film director, Ryan Griffen, and speculative architect, Liam Young, will be in conversation about their collaborative immersive film work Planet City, 2020, recently presented at the NGV Triennial, Melbourne. The talk will share insights into their individual practices, together with the powerful potential of speculative architecture and literature in worldbuilding.

Planet City, 2020, provides a window into an alternative urban future created as an antidote to the current climate crisis. Planet City is simultaneously an extraordinary image of tomorrow and a provocative examination of pertinent questions facing us today. Planet City considers what might happen if we radically reversed the sprawl of cities, instead housing the world’s projected population in one super dense, but workable city. Based on extensive research, and involving a global think tank of advisers and collaborators, Planet City shares what it could be like to house all humans and their attendant infrastructure and resources in a city for ten billion, enabling the rest of the globe to heal as a vast wilderness.

Ryan Griffen commenced work in the film industry following completion of a Bachelor of Communications, majoring in Media Arts and Production, from UTS, Sydney. He has since participated in the online component of the Digital Emmy winning Scorched and been a recipient of the AFC (Screen Australia) Producers Initiative Program. Inspired by 1950’s cinema through to 1980’s genre films, Griffen wants to tell stories similar to those he was drawn to growing up.

His first short film You Turn, 2015, premiered at the Sydney Film Festival and received a special mention for Screenwriting and Directing. He is writer, director and producer of the groundbreaking Australian genre series Cleverman, on which he consulted with traditional Aboriginal elders around the cultural elements in the show. Cleverman premiered at the Berlin Film Festival and later screened at Series Mania in Paris and has since aired around the world on ABCTV, Australia, Sundance TV and Netflix, United States and BBC3, UK.

Griffen is the author of the graphic novels Cleverman #1 and Cleverman #2 and Lustration for Gestalt Publishing in Australia. He is currently finishing his first feature script called Parallel and looking for funding to direct his first feature film, Disorganised Crime, written by Jon Bell.

Liam Young is a speculative architect and director who operates in the spaces between design, fiction and futures. He is cofounder of Tomorrows Thoughts Today, an urban futures think tank, exploring the local and global implications of new technologies and Unknown Fields, a nomadic research studio that travels on expeditions to chronicle these emerging conditions as they occur on the ground.

Young’s visionary films and speculative worlds are both extraordinary images of tomorrow and urgent examinations of the environmental questions facing us today. With his own films Young is a BAFTA nominated producer and has premiered with platforms ranging from Channel 4, SxSW, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, The Royal Academy of Arts, London, the BBC and the Guardian. His work is held in the collections of MOMA, New York; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne and M Plus, Hong Kong.

Young has held guest professorships at Princeton University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Cambridge and he currently runs the Masters in Fiction and Entertainment at SCI Arc, Los Angeles. Young has published several books including the recent Machine Landscapes: Architectures of the Post Anthropocene and Planet City.

^{Image: Planet City, video still}