Synthetic Spaces

About the exhibition

For the Synthetic Spaces exhibition, Nic Clear and Hyun Jun Park selected and scanned three iconic sites in Huddersfield: Castle Hill, Queensgate Market and the Railway Station. The information produced by the scans is highly technical and yet the images themselves evoke a much more speculative response to the sites. When used in combination with other techniques, the scans facilitate both an extremely precise mapping of the spaces as well as the opportunity to develop narratives around the spaces that engage with a wider set of ideas and values.

Clear and Park manipulated the scan data to represent and explore these familiar spaces in unique ways through the production of images, animations and drawings, and in doing so expanded the possibilities of contemporary spatial representation. The ability to manipulate the ‘point-cloud’ data allows Clear and Park to create synthetic spatial models that exist between the virtual and the actual and combine the ‘measured, the ‘experienced’ and even the ‘practiced’ in a way that no other form of spatial mapping is capable of.

About the researchers

Professor Nic Clear is a qualified architect, writer and curator, and Head of the Department of Architecture and 3D Design at the University of Huddersfield. He is also Co-Director of the Advanced Virtual and Technological Architecture Research Group (AVATAR). He was Professor of Architecture and Head of Department of Architecture and Landscape at University of Greenwich. Professor Clear joined the University of Greenwich in 2011 having taught at the Bartlett School of Architecture for over 20 years, where he was programme director of MArch Architecture. He was also history and theory co-ordinator of the Masters in Architectural Design, and has taught in the UK, Europe, US and Canada. In 2015 he was the Inaugural Professor for Research in Visionary Cities at the Institute of Fine Arts in Vienna.

The work Professor Nic Clear has developed is unique within architecture and architectural education due to the way film, video, animation and motion graphics are utilised to generate, develop and represent architectural and spatial practices. This work has an extensive reputation and has been shown at international film festivals across Europe, Asia and the US. He has written extensively on science fiction and architecture, and produced a number of speculative projects that propose architecture ‘as’ science fiction. He has designed and curated a number of critically acclaimed exhibitions, and his own work has been exhibited internationally.

Hyun Jun Park is a practitioner, writer, curator, and Lecturer in Architecture in the Department of Architecture and 3D Design at the University of Huddersfield. He is also Director of international development of Korea Institute of Ecological Architecture and Environment. He is a member of the Advanced Virtual and Technological Architecture Research Group (AVATAR) and working with Professor Nic Clear under the name of the advanced architecture research group, F.U.N (Future Urban Networks).

Park joined the University of Huddersfield in 2018. Before he joined the University, he worked at the University of Greenwich and in 2014-2018 taught postgraduate MArch Unit 15 with Professor Clear. Before he came to the UK, he completed over 30 projects during 10 years in architectural practice at SAMOO Architects & Engineers (SAMSUNG Corp), Seoul, Korea, where he was an associate, project designer and project architect. He was awarded his MArch by the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL. He finished his BA and MSc in Architecture by Hongik University, Seoul, Korea.

Park’s work has been exhibited in the Royal Academy Summer Show in 2015 and 2018, Seoul Design Festival in 2015, Milano Design Film Festival in 2016, and published internationally across Europe, Oceania and Asia. Park’s research interests include digital film and animation, narrative architecture, 3D scanning, Virtuality, VR/AR architecture, video gaming, NBIC (Nano-Bio-Info-Cogno) technology and science fiction in architecture. More information about Park’s exhibitions and research work can be found here.