How Barbican’s “In Other Worlds” Uses Immersion to Reframe Climate Future
World simulations have had strong appeal in immersive design, but they have often fallen short in more circumscribed environments due to their artificial, mechanical nature and narrower visions. “In Our Worlds,” a speculative immersive experience created by multimedia artist Liam Young and running since early May at the Barbican Center in London, has presented a sweeping, multisensory canvas and a robust, research-based speculative environment to stir the audience’s imagination about the future impact of climate change. The audience actually “inhabits” the worlds rather than just observing them.
I spoke with Luke Kemp, Head of Creative Programme, Immersive, at the Barbican Centre, to gain more insight into the mission and strategy behind the experience, as well as its role within Barbican Immersive's slate of productions.
MM: Why did the Barbican choose the topic of speculative futures for an immersive production?
LK: Considering the world today, there is a need to consider other ways of being in the world. The future can feel like a hard place to imagine, which creates an opportunity to consider what other kinds of futures we might build instead. Barbican Immersive has a long history of platforming work that sits at the edges of art, science, and technology, and the Immersive programme builds on that tradition from AI: More than Human to Feel the Sound. This felt like exactly the kind of bold, ambitious work that the Barbican exists to present: a project that uses emerging forms of experience to interrogate urgent questions, and that wouldn’t find a natural home anywhere else in the UK. Liam Young’s practice felt like a natural continuation of that strand: he operates at the intersection of architecture, filmmaking, and world-building, and his work asks audiences to inhabit possible futures rather than simply observe them. At a moment when climate anxiety is pervasive but often abstract, we felt there was real cultural value in making those futures felt, not just understood.
MM: How does the immersive element enhance an understanding of speculative futures?
LK: Speculative futures are, by definition, not yet real, but creating a place where you can be inside these environments and test out these futures is something an immersive experience can uniquely offer. Immersive environments collapse the distance between the viewer and the world being created. When you are inside a speculative landscape, the future stops being a concept and becomes something you have a physical relationship with. I hope the environment can transport you, and that you may begin to shift your perspective on the futures we present. This is particularly effective in In Other Worlds because the futures are grounded in real research, and the ambition is to go beyond science fiction and to feel like you could be somewhere you might actually end up.
MM: How does Liam Young’s perspective on the future stand out from other artists?
LK: Liam is a world-builder, and his collaborative practice engages with a multitude of perspectives. He works across scales from handmade figurines and movie miniature models to vast digital films. He has a background in architecture, but works as a director, artist, writer, and model maker, knowing the film and TV worlds as much as the arts. Crucially, he is not trying to form a singular vision of the future. He invites collaborators in to expand the idea that multiple perspectives are needed to help us think about what lies ahead in exciting and awe-inspiring ways. He isn’t imagining futures so much as extrapolating them from present-day systems that most people never see. That grounding in infrastructure and political economy distinguishes him from artists who tend toward the utopian or the dystopian as aesthetic modes. Liam’s futures are neither; instead, they can be seen as diagnostic.
MM: How does the higher level of interactivity in the experience add significantly to the experience?
LK: Let’s be clear that interactivity here doesn’t mean digital interaction in the conventional sense. The interactivity is the act of being in the world. There is scenography that creates elements of environments for you to inhabit and reflect upon. There are multiple layers of storytelling across mediums, enabling you to dive deeper if you want to. Audio stories by writers including Jane Wu, Lisa Joy, Chen Qiufan, and Claire G. Coleman are read by collaborators such as Jeffrey Wright, Diego Luna, and Maxine Peake, which bring alternative perspectives into the worlds, sitting alongside the films, models, graphic novel stories, and environments. The exhibition invites the audience to take a position, which is precisely what speculative thinking requires, and to ask what kind of future they actually want if it isn’t the one being presented. The most powerful speculative work doesn’t just present a future, it invites the viewer into it.
MM: What differentiates this immersive experience from others at the Barbican?
Luke Kemp: Liam’s work is singular in its visual language, cinematic in scale, but built from documentary research. Unlike productions that use immersive technology to create fantasy or entertainment environments, In Other Worlds uses the same tools to make the real world strange. It sits differently in our programme: it’s neither a straightforward art installation, theatrical production nor a commercial immersive experience, but something in between.
MM: What different solutions or perspectives does this experience offer on the climate crisis?
LK: In Other Worlds is not about solutions. Trying to define a single way forward is precisely what can be so limiting when we talk about the climate and the future. Instead, the exhibition creates rehearsal spaces not in the theatrical sense, but spaces where we can test future scenarios and ask whether this is the kind of world we would want to live in. It should be provocative and create an opportunity to ask questions of ourselves and of the world as it is today. Liam’s futures are neither warnings nor blueprints; they’re proposals. He shows worlds in which humans have adapted, reconstructed, and reorganized: First Nations peoples reclaiming stolen lands; ten billion people retreating into a single vast city while the rest of the planet rewilds. The terms of that adaptation are often uncomfortable and politically complex, but they remain hopeful. The experience asks audiences to sit with that complexity rather than resolve it.
MM: What are the main challenges of introducing this kind of immersive experience?
LK: Audiences are becoming more accustomed to immersive experiences, and they arrive with high expectations. However, the term remains broad, and it speaks more to a type of experience than to a specific medium. Some people will come expecting an art installation, some a theatrical event, some something closer to VR entertainment, and the work doesn’t always map neatly onto any of those. Operationally, large-scale projection and spatial audio environments require significant technical infrastructure and precise calibration; the margin for error is small and the lead time long. There is also a curatorial challenge in supporting work that is genuinely ambiguous in its conclusions- institutional contexts often tend to want clear messages, and Liam’s work deliberately doesn’t clearly define them.
MM: Why did Liam Young and your center decide not to use VR or AR in this experience?
LK: Liam has created exceptional VR experiences, most notably for Planet City, but this was never a format we intended to explore for this project. The decision came down to something fundamental: In Other Worlds is about shared futures, and VR is an intensely individual experience. The headset physically isolates you from the people around you, which feels like entirely the wrong form for work that is ultimately about what we do collectively. We wanted the spaces to be ones you inhabit together, where you are aware of other people inside the same world, making sense of it alongside you. Beyond that, we wanted to blend scales and mediums, bringing the digital, the textural, and the geological together. Visitors can encounter scale models, costumes, tapestries, and audio stories alongside large-scale digital films. Any experience should be led by the story first, with the display format chosen to serve that story; for this story, a shared, spatial environment made the most sense.
