These two moving image works –The Great Endeavor (2023) by Liam Young and COUNTER-NARRATIVES OF WATER (2024) by DISNOVATION.ORG – are screened as part of Beta Festival in partnership with Living Canvas at IMMA. Beta is a festival of art and technology critically engaging with the impact of emerging technologies on society. Taking Ireland’s role as a central node in today’s wired world as a starting point, Beta showcases and celebrate Ireland’s research and artistic communities through a combination of creativity, debate and experimentation. Beta Festival takes place 7 – 23 November across Dublin city centre.
About the films:
Liam Young
The Great Endeavor, 2023
9 minutes
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.
Project Credits
Director Liam Young
Production Design Liam Young
Producer Pegah Farahmand
Executive Producer Partizan
Executive Producers WaterBear Network: Lisa Cadwallader, Rickey Welch
VFX Supervisor Alexey Marfin
Original Score Lyra Pramuk
Costume Designer Ane Crabtree
Tailor Hae Min Yun
Matte Painter Attilio Bonelli
Environment Artists Andrew Hu, Luis Garcia Grech
Graphics Neasden Control Center
Science Consultants Holly Jean Buck, David Goldberg
Impact Producer WaterBear Network: Jessie Saville
Impact Marketing Lead WaterBear Network: Jolien Walhof
Presented By WaterBear Network In Association With Resilient Foundation, with the additional support of WaterBear Network, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, SCI Arc, Los Angeles
COUNTER-NARRATIVES OF WATER, 2024
DISNOVATION.ORG with Clémence Seurat
Video essay, 4k, stereo, 33:41 minutes
An inquiry into water commons, blending local stories, science, and fieldwork in a shifting karst landscape.
In modern times, the abundance of water and its constant availability paradoxically make it invisible. Underground circulation and complex hydrological systems, such as karsts, are relegated to the background of everyday life. Water becomes a mere factor of production.
Faced with this reality, initiatives are emerging. Counter-narratives are amplifying the voices and practices that are reinventing our relationship with water and the environment, away from the dominant discourses. In the Jura, the history of cooperatives, pioneers of social security, inspires collective water management. The karst, with its underground and borderless networks, calls for reflection on interdependence and the commons, inviting us to imagine new cooperative utopias around water.
In the form of an assemblage of aerial shots, 3D illustrations, interviews, and scientific images, this video essay explores crucial water issues in five chapters, from popular narratives to scientific knowledge, from the rejection of running water and its scarcity to the exploitation of rivers.
About the artists:
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.
DISNOVATION.ORG merges contemporary art, research & hacking to translate complex eco-social debates into operative and provocative exhibits critically. They create radical artworks staged as large laboratory experiments focused on energy, ecology, and economics that work as catalysts for crafting futures that diverge from prevailing narratives. Their exhibits, books, and videos permeated global cultural landscapes, fostering a critical dialogue at the nexus of artistic, political, and scientific inquiry. They co-edited A Bestiary of the Anthropocene with Nicolas Nova, an atlas of anthropic hybrid creatures, and The Pirate Book, an anthology on media piracy.
DISNOVATION.ORG’s works have been exhibited, performed, published and reviewed worldwide, including at the Palais de Tokyo, Centre Pompidou, Jeu de Paume (Paris), Museum of Art and Design (New York), Fonderie Darling (Montréal), HMKV (Dortmund), Haus der Kulturen der Welt (Berlin), ZKM (Karlsruhe), Ars Electronica (Linz), MU (Eindhoven), Strelka Institute (Moscow), China Museum of Digital Arts (Beijing), Chronus Art Center (Shanghai), Polytechnic Museum (Moscow), ISEA (Paris, Hong Kong), Elektra (Montréal), HEK (Basel)… Their work has been featured in Forbes, Wired, Vice, Motherboard, Libération, Die Zeit, Arte TV, Next Nature, Hyperallergic, Le Temps, Neural.it, Digicult, Gizmodo, and Filmmaker Magazine among others.
