Liam Young characterizes his talk as “a tour through a city that might look like a fiction, but is hiding everywhere in plain sight,” and describes himself as an architect working between documentary and fiction. Via Unknown Fields Division he has explored sites where the future is already taking shape, and through the think tank Tomorrows Thoughts Today Young explores emerging trends of the present. Young presents a tour of the City Everywhere, with the “animated media system” Kim Kardashian, to discover who we have become in the pixilated world. They discover discrepancies between GPS and actual terrain–“ghost geographies”–such as the island of Aditnálta, which exists only in its online documentation. A search for the physical spaces of the Internet leads to the Pineville Data Center, the spaces of the distributed workforce, the workers in factories that produces personal electronics, and ultimately to the lithium mines beneath Bolivia’s salt flats. Young concludes with an experiment in making current conditions visible and explicit: Silent Spring: a climate change acceleration performance.
