The Hawksmoor International Lecture Series 2017-2018 :: Nic Clear :: Professorial Inaugural Lecture F.U.N.: Future Urban Networks

  • Thursday 30th November 2017, 6.30pm
  • Tessa Blackstone Lecture Theatre [11_0003]

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 Professor 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. Professor 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.

Professor Nic Clear is an architect, writer and curator, he is Professor of Architecture and Head of the Department of Architecture and Landscape at the University of Greenwich, where he is also Co-Director of the AVATAR research Group. In 2015 Nic was the Inaugural Professor for Research in Visionary Cities at the Institute of Fine Arts 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.


Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *