We have always built the impossible. We dug canals between continents, joined coasts with rail lines, landed on distant planets and built cities that reach into the clouds. Now, on the precipice of climate collapse, we need to build the impossible again, a planetary machine for carbon removal.
As project collaborator and environmental social scientist, Holly Jean Buck writes: “First World nations have colonized the atmosphere with their greenhouse gas emissions.” To reach current climate targets, we cannot rely solely on slashing future emissions. We must also develop the capacity to remove existing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and store it underground at gigatonne scales. The ‘great endeavor’ to capture all this carbon will involve the construction of the largest engineering project in human history, and the development of a new infrastructure equivalent in size to that of the entire global fossil fuel industry. This is our generation’s moon landing, a mobilisation of workers and resources on a planetary scale that would only be possible through international cooperation to an extent never achieved.
The Great Endeavor approaches this challenge with radical optimism, collaborating with a network of scientists and technologists to create a short film that captures the design, construction, visualisation, and drama of what it might look like to build this infrastructural imaginary, transforming airborne carbon into a liquified gas to be pumped deep beneath the ocean floor or mineralised into the desert rock. Featuring workwear created in collaboration with Hollywood costume designer Ane Crabtree and set to the score of a new planetary workers’ song composed by vocalist Lyra Pramuk, the film celebrates a new technological sublime, chronicling the coordinated action to decolonise the atmosphere in our last great act of planetary transformation.
The presentation of this work is supported by the S+T+ARTS4WaterII programme
Liam Young is a designer, director and BAFTA nominated producer who operates in the spaces between design, fiction and futures. Described by the BBC as ‘the man designing our futures’, his visionary films and speculative worlds are both extraordinary images of tomorrow and urgent examinations of the environmental questions facing us today. As a worldbuilder he visualizes the cities, spaces and props of our imaginary futures for the film and television industry and with his own films he has premiered with platforms ranging from Channel 4, Tribeca, Venice Biennale, the BBC and the Guardian and they have been collected by institutions such as MoMA, Smithsonian, Art Institute of Chicago, SF MoMA, the Victoria & Albert Museum and the National Gallery of Victoria amongst many others.
In parallel to his work in entertainment he is in demand as one of the worlds foremost futurists consulting on next generation technologies and designs for clients such as Nike, BMW, Google, Sony, Mitsubishi, Wired, Showtime, Microsoft, Ford, NASA JPL, L’Oreal, the Dubai Government, DHL and numerous others. His work is informed by his academic research and has held guest professorships at Princeton University, MIT, and Cambridge and now runs the ground breaking Masters in Fiction and Entertainment at SCI Arc in Los Angeles. He has published several books including the recent Machine Landscapes: Architectures of the Post Anthropocene and Planet City, a story of a fictional city for the entire population of the earth.
Image credit: Courtesy of the artist