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 travel to the far north of Alaska, to visit a territory that sits in the collective imagination as one of the last remaining wildernesses. They spend the winter solstice with climate scientists camped out in the most northern cities on the planet to collect data to be fed into climate-modelling supercomputers and environmental policies further south. In this book, Unknown Fields peers inside the supercomputer to find a set of surreal landscapes generated from climate data and modelling software and given new narratives by native Alaskan authors; landscapes that sit between tradition and technology, the real and the imagined, the present and the future. 

9781907896880, 2016
24 × 17cm, illustrated, 64pp, paperback