BACKtoBACKLECTURES // Liam Young and Nic Clear
BackToBackLectures
29.09.2025 / 17:00 / @./studio3
The ./studio3 warmly invites you to the lectures of Liam Young and Nic Clear on Monday, September 29th, at 17:00.
Liam Young // New Planetary Imaginaries
Following centuries of colonization, globalization, and never-ending economic extraction, we have remade the world from the scale of the cell to the tectonic plate. The dystopias of science fiction that previously read as speculative cautionary tales are now the stage sets of the everyday as many of us live out our lives in a disaster film playing in real-time. In this seemingly futureless moment, the storytelling performance ‘Planetary Imaginaries’ will take us on a sci-fi safari through a screenscape of alternative and hopeful worlds. Slipping between fiction and documentary, the journey will be both an extraordinary image of tomorrow, and an urgent illumination of the environmental questions that are facing us today.
Liam Young is a speculative architect, designer, director and BAFTA nominated producer who operates in the spaces between design, fiction and futures. Described by the BBC as ‘the man designing our futures’, his visionary films and speculative worlds are both extraordinary images of tomorrow and urgent examinations of the environmental questions facing us today.
He is founder of the think tank Tomorrows Thoughts Today, a group whose work explores the possibilities of fantastic, speculative and imaginary urbanisms. Building his design fictions from the realities of present, Young also co-runs the Unknown Fields Division, a nomadic research studio that travels on location shoots and expeditions to the ends of the earth to document emerging trends, uncover the weak signals of possible futures and how modern cities are inextricably entangled with distant territories of extraction and waste.
He has been acclaimed in both mainstream and architectural media, including the BBC, NBC, Wired, Guardian, Time Magazine, and Dazed and Confused and his work has been collected by institutions such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Victoria and Albert Museum. He has taught internationally including the Architectural Association and Princeton University and now runs an MA in Fiction and Entertainment at SCI-Arc. Young manages his time between exploring distant landscapes and visualizing the fictional worlds he extrapolates from them.
Nic Clear // In the Year Twenty, Twenty Five: Three Projects
2025 has been a very strange and dangerous year, the wider political climate has seen the further rise of the ‘populist’ ethno-nationalism, reversals in climate policy promise an acceleration in environmental catastrophe, and the unregulated rise of LLM’s alongside the greater implementation of surveillance technologies seeks to threaten our identities, our creativity and our rights to privacy. In education we have witnessed the freedoms and existence of Universities challenged as they become seen as neo-liberal businesses whose sole directive is profit.However, against this backdrop, or perhaps because of it, Twenty, Twenty Five has given me the opportunity to develop three separate pieces of work that share a common speculative armature; projects that involve laser scanning, film and animation, installation, and performance that reflect some of the current issues of climate, environment, heritage, and the utopian opportunities that still undoubtedly exist.The three projects are one that has been completed, a second that is underway now and a third that is due in November, none of these projects will change the world but they are helping me to survive in it, perhaps they can help you too.
Professor Nic Clear is a registered architect, filmmaker, author, and curator, he is currently Dean of the School of Arts and Humanities at the University of Huddersfield. Professor Clear has taught across the UK and Europe as well as in the US and Canada, in 2015 he was the inaugural Professor for Research in Visionary Cities at the Institute of Fine Arts in Vienna.Professor Clear has been pioneering the use of the moving image in architectural education for nearly thirty years; his writings and drawings have been published internationally. Professor Clear edited the AD volume ‘Architectures of the Near Future’, in 2014 he co-edited ‘Educating Architects: How Tomorrow’s Practitioners Will Learn Today’ with Professor Neil Spiller and he has recently edited three issues of the Journal ‘Architecture Image Studies’ with Hyun Jun Park with whom he makes work under the name Clear+Park.
See you there!
