Unknown Fields

Unknown Fields is a nomadic design studio that ventures out on expeditions through the shadows cast by the contemporary city to trace the alternative worlds, alien landscapes, industrial ecologies and precarious wilderness that its technology and culture set in motion. These distributed landscapes, the iconic and the ignored, the excavated, irradiated and the pristine, are embedded in global systems that connect them in surprising and complicated ways to our everyday lives. Systems that form a network of vast but elusive tendrils, twisting threadlike over everything around us, crisscrossing the planet, connecting the mundane to the extraordinary.

In The Dark Side of the City Unknown Fields takes us on a road trip through a reimagined city that stretches across the ends of the earth. It is a portrait of a place that sits between documentary and fiction, a city of fragments; of drone footage and hidden camera investigations, of interviews and speculative narratives, of toxic objects, reimagined landscapes and distributed matter from distant sites. The Dark Side of the City is a collection of stories from the constellation of elsewheres that are conjured into being by the city’s wants and needs, fears and dreams.