In Other Worlds Brings Diego Luna and a Powerhouse Cast to London's Barbican
TL;DR: Liam Young's immersive exhibition opens at London's Barbican from May 21 to September 6, 2025. Diego Luna, Jeffrey Wright, Denise Gough, and Richard Ayoade lend their voices to six speculative worlds about humanity's future. This isn't a film or series—but the creative team (Lisa Joy from Westworld, climate novelist Kim Stanley Robinson, Blue Eye Samurai writer Jane Wu) suggests it's worth tracking even if you're outside London.
Liam Young has spent his career designing futures nobody asked for—and somehow making you care about them anyway. With In Other Worlds, he's finally built something big enough that the hype doesn't feel like oversell.
The exhibition runs May 21 through September 6, 2025 at London's Barbican Centre. It's a physical walk-through six imagined worlds, each one a speculative proposition about where humanity could be headed. The voices anchoring the experience belong to Diego Luna (Andor, Rogue One), Jeffrey Wright (American Fiction), Denise Gough (also from Andor), Richard Ayoade, Maxine Peake, space scientist Maggie Aderin, and others. The writers behind it read like a roster of people who actually think about the future: Lisa Joy (who co-created Westworld), Kim Stanley Robinson (author of The Ministry for the Future), Chen Qiufan, Jane Wu (Blue Eye Samurai), and AI scholar Kate Crawford.
The costume design comes from Ane Crabtree, who built the visual language of The Handmaid's Tale and The Sopranos. That detail matters because costume design does ideological work. It tells you who holds power before anyone speaks.
What's striking is the gap between the talent assembled and what most people would expect from an "exhibition" in 2025. This isn't a static gallery show. It's closer to walking through the production design of a science-fiction film that doesn't exist as a film.
What You'll Actually Walk Through — and Why It's Not Like Other Immersive Experiences
In Other Worlds isn't one of those pop-up immersive Van Gogh or Stranger Things experiences built around existing IP. It's genuinely original world-building, which is rarer than it sounds.
Visitors move through six distinct environments filled with LED walls, large-scale projections, soundscapes, costumes, physical set design, film miniatures, and what the Barbican calls "speculative artefacts"—objects that feel like they belong to futures that don't exist yet. Diego Luna narrates both a prologue and epilogue, framing the whole journey.
The six worlds include:
- The World Machine — industrial-scale planetary infrastructure
- Technoglomerates — materials allegedly forged from AI's raw matter
- A new Aboriginal space industry — a politically charged reimagining of who owns space exploration
- Planet City — the single most ambitious idea here: 10 billion humans stacked into one megacity (7,000 languages, layered living), while the rest of Earth rewilds
- Geoengineering and atmospheric transformation environments
- A final sequence that breaks out of the Barbican's traditional galleries and ends in its car park
That car park ending is deliberate. No walls on imagination. No institutional frame around the future. It's the kind of specific curatorial choice that separates genuine artistic risk from "exhibition as marketing," and it tells you Young knows what he's doing.
Why This Matters If You're Following Andor, Westworld, or Climate Fiction
Here's what I keep coming back to: this exhibition arrives at exactly the moment when streaming platforms are contracting hard. The past three years have killed most mid-budget speculative content. Andor is the exception—the rare prestige sci-fi show that got to finish on its own terms. Its second season finale drew some of Disney+'s strongest engagement numbers for a Star Wars property since The Mandalorian Season 1.
Most coverage treats In Other Worlds as an arts-and-culture curiosity, a gallery show with famous voices attached; the more interesting read is that it represents a quiet defection from the streaming model by exactly the kind of talent those platforms can't afford to lose. Young's decision to build this as a physical, immersive experience rather than pitch it to a streamer wasn't incidental. Exhibitions can't be cancelled after eight episodes. They can't get pulled in a rights dispute. This one runs 108 days, and it ends when it ends.
If you've followed Diego Luna through Andor Season 1 and Season 2 on Disney+ Hotstar (India), or if you watched Lisa Joy's Westworld on JioCinema, or if you caught Jeffrey Wright in American Fiction on Prime Video—this exhibition represents a significant off-screen collaboration between talent you already care about. Movie OTT's tracking the project for any streaming companion content that emerges from the Barbican run. Exhibitions of this scale and critical profile frequently generate documentary tie-ins, filmed records, or streaming specials within 6–12 months of closing.
The Planet City concept is worth noting if you're thinking about representation in sci-fi. A single city housing 10 billion people, with thousands of languages—it's a deliberately global-south framing that contrasts sharply with how Western science fiction typically ignores the subcontinent's technological ambitions. Whether that's intentional on Young's part or a byproduct of his genuinely international collaborator pool, the effect is real.
Who Liam Young Is and Why These Collaborators Matter
Young is an Australian-born designer, director, and producer. The BBC once called him "the man designing our futures," which sounds like hyperbole until you look at his actual output.
His previous major work, Planet City (2020), was a film and design project imagining the single-megacity concept that now forms one of the exhibition's six worlds. It screened at institutions including the National Gallery of Victoria and the Venice Architecture Biennale, and Dezeen named it one of the most significant speculative design projects of that year, yet it hadn't broken into mainstream cultural conversation. In Other Worlds is the expansion of that concept to full public scale, and the collaborators he's assembled suggest he's serious about the intellectual work, not just the spectacle.
Lisa Joy co-created Westworld and co-wrote Fallout for Amazon. Kim Stanley Robinson's The Ministry for the Future (2020) is arguably the most influential climate-fiction novel of the past decade—it's required reading if you care about how stories shape climate imagination. Chen Qiufan is one of China's most celebrated science-fiction writers. Jane Wu was a writer on Blue Eye Samurai, Netflix's critically acclaimed animated series that earned a 97% on Rotten Tomatoes in its first season. Kate Crawford's Atlas of AI (2021) is one of the defining texts on artificial intelligence's material and political costs.
That's not decoration. That's intellectual seriousness.
What Young Actually Said About the Exhibition's Purpose
At the Barbican press preview, Young was direct about the stakes. Here's what he said, according to The Hollywood Reporter: "The future doesn't rush over us like water. It's not something that happens to us. It's an act of creation. It's something we make, moment by moment, together."
It's the kind of line that could sound like corporate vagueness if Young hadn't spent years backing it up in his work. But he followed with something more specific: "The crises we face are no longer crises of technology, but rather crises of the imagination. If we wanted to, we could wake up tomorrow and change everything about how we do the world."
That's the spine of the whole exhibition. Not "here are five possible futures" but "here are five possible futures because imagination is the constraint, not technology."
Luke Kemp, head of creative programming at Barbican Immersive, added that the program exists to "place the visitor at the heart of the experience" and to help people "imagine different futures and create the worlds that we want to exist, rather than the ones that are being created for us."
How This Fits Into the Current Immersive Experience Landscape
The immersive experience market has matured fast in the past five years. Most of what you see—immersive Friends, immersive Stranger Things, pop-up Frida Kahlo exhibitions—is built around existing IP. There's a formula: licensing, projection mapping, some interactive element, gift shop, done.
In Other Worlds is different because it's a genuinely original world-building exercise anchored by serious writers and producers. The closest comparison might be Westworld (where Lisa Joy's involvement makes that direct), a project that treats speculative world-building as the primary art form, not a wrapper around a beloved franchise. Think about Episode 8 of Westworld Season 1, "Trace Decay," where the constructed world starts to feel more real than the one outside it. That's the sensation Young seems to be chasing here, except there's no screen between you and the architecture.
For Movie OTT watchers specifically: this exhibition suggests that the talent behind Andor, Westworld, Blue Eye Samurai, and Fallout are thinking beyond individual platforms. They're building ideas at the scale of exhibitions, documentaries, and potentially new streaming formats that haven't been named yet. The question isn't whether In Other Worlds produces a companion piece. It's what form that takes.
Before You Plan a Trip (and What to Watch For After)
The exhibition runs through September 6, 2025. Tickets are available through the Barbican Centre's website. No touring dates have been announced, but exhibitions of this profile typically travel to major international venues by late 2025 or early 2026. Watch for announcements by mid-autumn.
For streaming audiences outside London, the most likely next development is documentary or filmed content. Disney+ (given the Andor connection) or Amazon (given Lisa Joy's Fallout relationship) would be the logical homes. Neither platform has announced anything yet, but these projects rarely announce tie-ins until the physical exhibition has run for a few weeks and the filmmakers can assess what actually resonates with visitors.
If you're an Andor fan specifically: Denise Gough appears throughout the exhibition. If you followed Westworld's world-building obsessively, Lisa Joy's fingerprints on the conceptual architecture will be obvious.
The thing Young keeps saying is worth taking at face value: the future isn't predetermined. It's still being made. And for the next 108 days, he's letting you walk through six versions of what that could look like.
