It says a lot about the complexity of Nic Clear and Hyun Jun Park’s submission that, just by looking at them, judges were sensitised to thinking that their images were – at some point in their evolution – stills from a video, so filmic do they appear in their nature.
But throughout the judging process, the vaguely haunting, digitally created images lingered on in the minds of the judges to see them ultimately materialise in first place.
Academics Clear (a professor at the School of Arts and Humanities, Huddersfield University) and Park (architecture course director, Leeds Beckett University) “capture, edit and manipulate point cloud data to document spaces, create speculative projects and spatial propositions that engage with, and respond to, specific site narratives”.
The Ghost image declares itself “a collage that blurs delineation between actual and virtual”. The 3D laser scan echoes “drawings of Beaux Arts academicism”, rendered as black-and-white overlays of images, feeling like “X-rays” but critically “alluding to issues of time and the patina of age”. Judges responded to the highly composed nature of this image, intimating AI but remaining firmly under the control of the authors.
But it was The WavEs – renders extracted from a point cloud scan video of Virginia Woolf’s garden and writing lodge at Monk’s House, her home in Rodmell, East Sussex – that really excited judges, “tracing dream-like vectors as if motivated by the desire-lines of Woolf’s restless characters”.
“The other work is to some extent just beautiful collage,” observed Samantha Hardingham, “but this one really feels like an evocation or a study of a place in time.”
Koldo Lus Arana agreed with the technical skill and ‘familiarity’ of the former, but said the latter had an “Eadweard Muybridge cinematographic feel – of flattened time passing”.
Mary Duggan felt “compelled to move through the image” while Jan-Carlos Kucharek felt “a strange sense of being drawn through both time and space on paper”.
“The scans are able to capture the garden in ways that appear both substantial and yet ethereal,” wrote Clear. But it was the artful complexity of the layering that somehow reified the drawing, with Lus Arana noting “a highly adept composition that becomes more alive the more you look into it.”