Speculative architect Liam Young has opened an immersive exhibition at London's Barbican Centre exploring futures shaped by artificial intelligence, planetary infrastructure and climate technology.

Named In Other Worlds, the exhibition combines films, installations, audio stories and set design across three locations within the Barbican, including its Curve gallery and underground car park.

Each work presents a different vision of the future, engaging with sci-fi concepts such as planetary supercomputers, hyper-dense mega cities and new energy infrastructures.

One proposal on display is World Machine, a newly commissioned film by Young that premiered at the Barbican this month.

In the film, Young responds to the accelerating use and demand of artificial intelligence (AI), imagining a future in which Earth's surfaces are woven into a circuit of power and calculation by a planetary supercomputer.

Another project by Young, titled Planet City, imagines a world where Earth's 10-billion population lives together in one ultra-dense super-metropolis, while the rest of the planet is left to rewild and regenerate.

To further immerse visitors in each fictional world, actors including Diego Luna, Maxine Peake and Richard Ayoade voice audio stories presented throughout the exhibition.

Young worked with a host of collaborators across cinema, literature and design, while musicians including Forest Swords, Space Afrika and Iwiri First Nations Choir created original music and soundscapes featured in the show.

"We're trying to bring together a series of new planetary imaginaries," Young told Dezeen. "Hopeful and aspirational images of the future."

"Science fiction began as a place where we would imagine the wildest possible futures and strange technologies that couldn't yet be real," he continued.

"Now the role of science fiction and the role of these worlds in the exhibition is to prototype the possibilities and consequences of technologies that are already here."

The exhibition also features set design, graphic narratives and sculptural installations intended to bring Young's fictional worlds to life.

Young described the exhibition as an invitation for visitors to engage with sometimes challenging visions of what the future might look like.

"It might be confronting and it might be frustrating, but hopefully people are empowered by seeing the possibilities that are on show," Young said.

"We need to be asking for cultural and political change at global and planetary scales, well beyond local individual choices."

The exhibition is Young's first major UK solo exhibition and spans multiple locations across the Barbican Centre.

"Barbican is a utopia," said Young. "It was built with the impulse to imagine how we might live differently."

"What we see in the show is an amazing collection of collaborators – we approached future world-building with a boldness and courage, and the Barbican is an artefact of that extraordinary endeavour," he continued.

Photographs by Thomas Adank, courtesy of Barbican Immersive.

In Other Worlds is at the Barbican Centre until 6 September 2026. See Dezeen Events Guide for an up-to-date list of architecture and design events taking place around the world.

Partnership content

This article was written by Dezeen for the Barbican Centre as part of a partnership. Find out more about Dezeen's partnership content here.