Unknown Fields: The Dark Side of the City

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 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.

Exhibition
In The Dark Side of the City Unknown Fields takes us on a road trip through a reimagined city that stretches across 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.

Our cities are extraordinary constellations of products, goods and technologies. From the smallest and most inconsequential of objects to the most intricate and complex, these material things set in motion a vast, planetary scale infrastructure. Our city casts shadows that stretch far and wide. 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.

Book series
“Tales from the Dark Side of the City” is a series of books that form an atlas to the territories and stories of a city that stretches across the entire planet, a city that sits between documentary and fiction, 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. 

“Tales from the Dark Side of the City” Box Set

A World Adrift
South China Sea and Inner Mongolia Expedition

The Breastmilk of the Volcano
Bolivia and the Atacama Desert Expedition

Snowing in the Supercomputer
Far North Alaska Expedition

Never Never Lands
Western Australian Outback Expedition

Treasured Island
Madagascar Expedition

High Strange
United States Black Sites Expedition

View further details at Unknown Fields, contact info [​at​] unknownfieldsdivision.com, or visit Unknown Fields’s Twitter or Facebook pages.

You can view signup details for Unknown Fields’ next expedition here.