Young, Liam. 2023. The Great Endeavor. Video. National Gallery of Victoria, Australia.
Photograph by Elizabeth Cole of Liam Young's The Great Endeavor, 2023.
Continuing my effort to find works with a positive stance on our ability to remediate climate change, I saw Liam Young’s Planetary Redesign exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria on 5 October 2023. The exhibition featured his video work The Great Endeavor 2023, which depicts the utopian premise that the world had united to develop a global network of machines to remove greenhouse gases from the atmosphere.
The video fuses real footage of roiling oceans and dust storm shrouded deserts with digitally rendered images to show the gigantic machines being built and deployed on land, at sea and in the sky. The quasi-documentary result suggests a form of mechanical territorialisation (Leach 2006, 92-94), an impression enhanced by the almost complete absence of people in the work. While the images of relentlessly advancing machines call to mind the familiar science-fiction trope about the domination of artificial intelligence, traces of humanity echo in the faint melodic chanting of the soundscape.
Projected on a large screen in a darkened chamber, the 10 minute video looped continuously. The audience was offered bean bags or a bench. While I was there most people stayed for only a few minutes. I stayed for two cycles of the video, in part for research but also due to the compellingly realistic visuals. The affect (Hickey-Moody 2013, 85-86) was that I suspended my disbelief, and wondered if this could in fact be achieved. From the wall text this seems to be the artist’s intention.
I am contemplating how to infuse my works with hope as a way of initially engaging and then retaining the viewer. Young’s work offers useful lessons.
Bibliography:
Hickey-Moody, Anna. 2013. "Chapter 4 Affect as Method: Feelings, Aesthetics ad Affective Pedagogy." In Deleuze and research methodologies edited by Rebecca Coleman and Jessica Ringrose, 79-95. Edinburgh University Press (Edinburgh, United Kingdom).
Leach, Neil. 2006. Camouflage. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.