In Other Worlds at the Barbican: The Immersive Exhibition That Makes Sci-Fi Feel Urgent
TL;DR: Liam Young's In Other Worlds opens at London's Barbican Centre on 21 May 2026 and runs through 6 September. It's an immersive walk-through featuring six speculative futures voiced by Diego Luna, Jeffrey Wright, and Denise Gough—grounded in real climate science. Not a film. Not a game. Something harder to categorize, and that's entirely the point. Ticketed exhibition only; no streaming release confirmed yet.
There's a moment early in In Other Worlds when Diego Luna's voice cuts through the ambient noise of the Barbican Centre and pulls you somewhere else entirely. Not a cinema. Not a theme park. Something in between—and if creator Liam Young has done his job right, something you can't quite shake on the Tube ride home.
That's the ambition sitting at the heart of this major new immersive exhibition. Not to entertain you into passivity, but to rehearse you for a future that hasn't been decided yet.
What You're Walking Into: Six Speculative Worlds Across One London Building
Liam Young's In Other Worlds is structured as a journey through six distinct imagined futures. Each one is grounded in genuine climate science and speculative technology. The experience mixes:
- Voice narration from a cast of prestige actors (more on them in a moment)
- LED wall displays and large-scale projections
- Physical installations: costumes, movie miniatures, tapestries, set design
- Soundscapes and objects called "Technoglomerates" — stones forged from raw materials of artificial intelligence
- A centerpiece concept called Planet City: all 10 billion humans stacked in a single metropolis while the rest of Earth rewilds
The exhibition ends in the Barbican's car park. Yes, the car park. Make of that spatial symbolism what you will.
This is a ticketed, location-based experience running across the Barbican Centre's main exhibition spaces through 6 September 2026. Booking is available through the Barbican's official site.
The Voice Cast and Creative Team: Recognizable Names, Serious Stakes
Here's what's striking: the roster assembled for In Other Worlds reads like a streaming platform's dream lineup.
Diego Luna narrates the prologue and epilogue. For anyone watching Andor on Disney+ Hotstar (the most critically respected Star Wars production in years), Luna is inseparable from that show's slow-burn political storytelling — think the way his Cassian sits silent through Kino Loy's prison revolt speech in Episode 10, doing nothing but listening, and how that restraint carries more weight than any blaster fight in the franchise. His presence here isn't accidental. Young clearly wanted voices that carry weight, that audiences already trust.
Jeffrey Wright appears throughout. You know him from American Fiction (available on Amazon Prime Video in select regions) and the James Bond franchise. Denise Gough, also in Andor, adds another thread connecting this exhibition directly to prestige streaming content. Richard Ayoade, Maxine Peake, Alma Pöysti (whose Fallen Leaves won the Jury Prize at Cannes 2023), and Natasha Wanganeen round out a cast that suggests institutional seriousness. Not a passion project squeezed between bigger gigs.
The writing room is equally weighted. Lisa Joy, co-creator of Westworld and showrunner of Fallout, contributed alongside Kim Stanley Robinson, whose novel The Ministry for the Future is the most discussed climate-fiction text in years. Chen Qiufan (AI 2041), Jane Wu (Blue Eye Samurai), and AI scholar Kate Crawford (Atlas of AI) completed the writers' room — a lineup that would be extraordinary even for a prestige television production.
Costumes from Ane Crabtree (The Handmaid's Tale, The Sopranos). Production design that's been in development for months. This isn't a one-off.
Why This Matters to Indian Audiences (and Everyone Else Watching Prestige Sci-Fi)
Let me be direct: In Other Worlds isn't coming to Netflix India or Amazon Prime Video. It's a physical exhibition, locked to London through September. If you're in India and can't travel to the Barbican, you won't experience it in its intended form—at least not yet.
But here's what matters. The creative voices behind In Other Worlds are the same voices powering the streaming content you're actively watching. Diego Luna in Andor. Lisa Joy building Fallout. These aren't separate ecosystems. They're the same artists moving between physical and digital formats, asking the same questions about how we imagine the future.
Movie OTT tracks streaming availability across Netflix, Prime Video, Disney+ Hotstar, JioCinema, SonyLIV, and Zee5. Given the Barbican's history of producing companion content and the BBC's existing relationship with Young, a documentary or streaming adaptation feels plausible before the exhibition closes in September. If one surfaces, Movie OTT will have the platform and regional availability details.
For now, the India angle is this: understanding what prestige storytellers do outside traditional screen formats tells you something real about where the industry is heading.
What Liam Young Actually Said About Why This Matters
At a press preview on 22 May, Young was direct. "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."
That's not theme-park language. That's someone who genuinely believes the crisis we face is no longer a technology crisis but "a crisis of the imagination." Our problems, he argued, are the result of "our own biases and blind spots, politics and prejudices."
Luke Kemp, head of creative programming at Barbican Immersive, sharpened the institutional argument: "Now is the time to once again look for new stories, imagine different futures and create the worlds that we want to exist, rather than the ones that are being created for us."
Notice the phrasing. Created for us—by whom, exactly? That productive ambiguity is where the exhibition's real work happens.
The Liam Young Question: Why You Should Know This Name
Young is Australian-born, based across London and Los Angeles, occupying a strange space between academic futurism and commercial filmmaking. His previous work includes Planet City, a speculative documentary about the same concept at the heart of In Other Worlds—a single human megacity while the rest of the planet rewilds.
This is his first solo UK exhibition. The fact that the Barbican committed significant institutional resources suggests they see Young's work not as a one-time event but as part of a larger conversation about how we collectively imagine survival. (The BBC has called him "the man designing our futures," which tells you something about how seriously the creative industry takes his thinking, even if the label is a bit breathless.)
Hard to say if In Other Worlds travels internationally, but Young's previous work has done the festival and museum circuit. The modular structure—six distinct worlds—makes touring logistically plausible. Whether a filmed version follows is another question entirely. Movie OTT will track any streaming announcements as they're confirmed.
The Broader Argument: When Science Fiction Stops Being Escape
I keep coming back to something Young said about "rehearsals for the future." That's a specific claim. It reframes what we usually ask of science fiction.
Most sci-fi cinema—even the best—operates in warning or wonder. Alfonso Cuarón's Children of Men is devastating because it offers no exit. Annihilation is beautiful and sealed-off. The genre has become so fluent in dystopia that audiences have arguably been trained to experience climate anxiety as aesthetic pleasure. A strange feedback loop. And frankly, it doesn't change anything.
Young's explicit project is to break that loop. The Barbican's framing asks: "What if the future could actually be hopeful?" Not naively optimistic—Planet City with 10 billion humans stacked in one megacity is confrontational. But hopeful in the sense that it requires human choice, agency, imagination.
Most coverage of In Other Worlds has focused on the celebrity voice cast as the headline draw; the more interesting question is whether Young's approach—speculative design as participatory civic act rather than passive spectacle—represents a genuine formal breakthrough or just a very expensive TED talk with better production values. The answer probably depends on whether walking through the Barbican's car park at the end makes you feel implicated or merely impressed. That distinction matters enormously. For streaming platforms building prestige sci-fi, the lesson is that audiences are hungry for speculative content that doesn't end in ash. Andor understood this (Luna's presence here is no accident). Fallout plays with post-apocalyptic aesthetics while insisting on the comedy and absurdity of survival. The through-line across prestige science fiction right now is a slow turn away from pure nihilism.
In Other Worlds is that tendency made physical. Made walkable. Made impossible to scroll past.
Comparable Experiences: What's Actually New Here
In Other Worlds doesn't fit neatly into traditional categories, but its closest cousins are worth considering:
| Project | Year | Format | What Happened | |---|---|---|---| | Sleep No More (Punchdrunk) | 2011–2024 | Immersive theatre | Ran 13 years across 100,000+ performances in NYC before closing; spawned an entire genre of walk-through narrative | | The Void (Star Wars VR) | 2017–2019 | Location-based VR | Commercially ambitious, closed during COVID | | Planet City (Liam Young) | 2020 | Speculative documentary | Critical acclaim; BBC broadcast |
What's striking is that In Other Worlds is closest in spirit to Sleep No More—an experience using physical space to generate meaning that a screen can't replicate. But its intellectual framework is closer to Planet City, suggesting Young is building a coherent artistic body rather than chasing trends.
The Practical Details: Where, When, How to See It
Barbican Centre, London
21 May – 6 September 2026
This is a ticketed exhibition. Booking and admission details are available through the Barbican's official site.
Expect to spend 60–90 minutes moving through the six worlds. It's not a film (no fixed runtime), not a game (no interaction in the traditional sense), not quite performance art. The closest honest description: a walk-through narrative experience grounded in speculative design and voice performance.
The exhibition is physically demanding—there's significant walking, varied lighting conditions, and spatial disorientation that's intentional. Not recommended for people with mobility issues or severe claustrophobia, though specific access information is available through the Barbican's accessibility page.
What Comes Next
The 108-day run suggests institutional confidence in sustained audience interest. Whether touring follows depends on Liam Young's schedule and the availability of physical installations—both major variables.
A documentary or streaming companion piece, given the BBC's existing relationship with Young and the Barbican's history of broadcast partnerships, feels like the likeliest way international audiences will engage with this work. That's speculative on my part, but worth watching for.
Until then, In Other Worlds exists as a fixed experience in a fixed place. That's not a limitation—it's increasingly rare. The fact that something this creatively serious has chosen to exist only as a physical exhibition, only in London, only for 108 days, tells you something about what the Barbican thinks art should do. It should pull you somewhere you can't follow on a screen. It should make you think differently about what comes next.
That's worth the journey.
Sources
- The Hollywood Reporter — Diego Luna, 'Andor' Star Denise Gough, Jeffrey Wright, Richard Ayoade Lend Their Voices to Liam Young's Immersive Experience 'In Other Worlds'
- Barbican Centre — In Other Worlds official exhibition page
- The Guardian — Liam Young, 'Planet City' and the future of speculative design
