Liam Young Brave New Now F'13 Studio

505a Graduate Design Studio: Liam Young
BRAVE NEW NOW 2013

We have always imagined the spaces and environments of a day yet to come. As we flick through the catalogues of yesterday's tomorrows we see starry spaceship skies, moon base futures, jet pack ray guns, food in pill form,flying cars and xray specs and we wonder whatever happened to the futures we were promised. In these polemic visions we furnish the fictional spaces of tomorrow with objects and ideas that at the same time chronicle the contradictions, inconsistencies, flaws and frailties of the everyday. These visions of what's to come do not merely anticipate but actively shape technological futures through their effects on the collective imagination. This capacity for a fictional project to simultaneously reflect the current condition while suggesting the possibility of the next is what drives our engagement with these visions of the future. BRAVE NEW NOW slips suggestively between the real and the imagined to present filmic fragments of the near future city.  

In 2013 the studio followed the fibre optic cables and traversed the anonymous corridors of big box server farms to uncover the physical infrastructures of the internet. As the cooling fans spin and the LED's flicker the BRAVE NEW NOW speculated on our future relationships to data. The studio was developed in collaboration with Ivan Poupyrev of Design Research and motion studios by OLGV.

The student films produced for this class are compiled in the student work area of this site. 

They are also collected in a Vimeo channel: https://vimeo.com/channels/bravenewnow2013

See more photographs of Google data centers