Under Tomorrows Sky is a fictional, future city. A think tank of scientists, technologists, designers, artists and science fiction authors have collectively developed this imaginary place, the landscapes that surround it and the stories it contains.  

Working with special effects artists from such films as Alien, Sunshine and Blade Runner and borrowing from the disappearing techniques of physical film prop making Liam Young and his team have built a room sized movie miniature model of the city. Across the course of the project authors have inhabited the scale city as a stage set and developed a collection of characters, narratives, films and illustrations.

Emerging in the shadows of the decaying towers of a post oil Dubai, geo engineered by climatologists and influenced by the imminent economic boom of the Indian subcontinent it is a terraformed urban island. A city that is grown rather than built, a creature, living, breathing and computing, a seething ecology that has become a new metropolitan megaform. Bots drift across this inhabited geology, a dense accumulation of crevice rooms, and public valleys, slowly printing and reprinting, endlessly as demand requires.

Through the strata is threaded the tendrils of a complex circulatory system that feeds the moist surfaces of a vibrant endemic ecology where nature and technology intertwine and biology becomes a new economy. Supercomputers whistle and whir, a virtual city, a parallel city overlaid directly onto the physical turns everything into interface, everything into program. It is an imaginary landscape extrapolated from the wonders and possibilities of emerging biological and technological research. The city watches on, breathing, blinking.

Artist: Liam Young

Commissioned by MU Foundation in Eindhoven.

Images courtesy of Liam Young.