Unknown Fields is a nomadic design studio that ventures out on expeditions into the shadows cast by the contemporary city, to uncover the industrial ecologies and precarious wilderness it has brought into being. Tales from the Dark Side of the City is a series that forms an atlas to the territories and stories of a city that stretches across the entire planet. Sitting between documentary and fiction, this is a city of dislocated sites, of drone footage and hidden-camera investigations, of interviews and speculative narratives, of toxic objects and distributed matter from distant grounds. These books are a collection of tales from the constellation of elsewheres that are conjured into being by the city’s wants and needs, fears and dreams.

Unknown Fields commandeers an old US school bus and heads off through the borderlands of military outposts and the crater-pocked, fenced-off folkloric territories of the United States. The militarised landscapes which defend the city are hidden behind barbed wire or beneath the low-resolution distortions of doctored satellite images; beyond their physical might, they are sites of psychological warfare, where rumour begins. High Strange is a graphic novel developed with embedded comic artist Kristian Donaldson: a portrait of a landscape as a factory of fictions.

9781907896897, 2016
24 × 17cm, illustrated, 64pp, paperback