Nic Clear | F.U.N.: A City of Tomorrow

We are currently at a moment of profound technological change and while there is a great deal of hype surrounding the Nano-Bio-Info-Cogno technologies, the revolutionary significance of these developments on our cities is either not fully grasped, or seen in the context of dystopian scenarios of totalitarian enslavement and runaway grey goo. In this lecture Nic Clear will try and outline how our fears of technology are tied to a variety of nostalgic concepts of the city and an ideology of technophobia, he will contrast this more positivist readings of technology some of which are taken from the discourse of speculative fiction. Nic Clear will then describe a series of urban projects that speculate on the implementation of the NBIC technologies in a post-singularity, post scarcity world that questions the laissez-faire attitudes that underpin much of contemporary society.

Nic Clear i s an architect, writer and curator, he is Professor and Head of Department Architecture and 3D Design at the University of Huddersfield. In 2015 Nic was the Inaugural Professor for Research in Visionary Cities at the Institute of Art and Architecture in Vienna. Nic has written extensively on science fiction and architecture and produced a number of speculative projects that propose architecture ‘as’ science fiction. Nic has designed and curated a number of critically acclaimed exhibitions and his own work has been exhibited internationally.