The Los Angeles-based film director and "speculative architect" is having his first solo show in his home country, opening in August at the National Gallery of Victoria.

Young's unsettling virtual worlds are a way of imagining the radical solutions needed to live on a warming planet, and the exhibition includes his latest moving image work, The Great Endeavour, currently showing at the Venice Architecture Biennale.

It's an extraordinary response to a simple premise: planetary scale removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere is necessary because cutting emissions won't do enough to reach climate targets.

Young has created an imaginary world where carbon capture and storage happens at a scale equivalent to that of the entire global fossil fuel industry - which is what needs to happen, according to the scientists Young consulted for the project.

"Every oil rig, every pipeline, every gas plant that currently exists on earth, we need to build again to do the reverse ... if we don't do it, it's literally game over," the artist told AAP.

The Great Endeavour imagines what such an engineering project might look like - giant fans capture carbon dioxide, as machines strip away the carbon and convert it to liquid.

Centuries of industrialisation have left vast amounts of carbon in the atmosphere, making planetary-scale carbon capture essential, Young explains.

"It's a fundamental part of contemporary climate policy but it's difficult and it's controversial, so we don't really engage with it," he said.

Young's world-building might help - his work seems visionary, but in a way, it's simply a form of science illustration based on thinking about peer-reviewed research and imagining what that might look like.

Yet his films are unsettling, to say the least. It's not clear whether his artistic vision for the planet is dystopian or radically optimistic.

The answer depends on who's watching, says Young, who has intentionally used beautiful or "sublime" imagery mixed with visions of intense industrialisation, disrupting instinctive reactions from the viewer.

"Culture has conditioned us to see those images as dystopian, but these massive scale infrastructures are actually filled with hope and aspiration and without them, we don't have a future," he said.

As for carbon capture in the real world, there are about 40 commercial facilities currently in operation, according to the International Energy Agency.

Young initially trained as an architect in Brisbane and then worked in London, but soon became frustrated with traditional architecture.

He began using his architecture skills for film projects and virtual world-building, moving to LA to introduce his provocative ideas into popular culture through Hollywood.

Another of his films, Planet City, will be on show. It imagines what a city might look like if it housed the entire human population of 10 billion people, leaving the rest of the globe to return to a vast wilderness.

The artist said it's been wonderful to return to Australia and he feels his work has resonance in a country that's long been seen as the world's quarry.

"In Australia, carbon capture is used as an alibi for the government to continually invest in fossil fuels... I think we're on the front lines of climate change," he said.

Liam Young: Planetary Redesign opens at the National Gallery of Victoria on August 18.

Australian Associated Press