#unknown fields division

[voidingintotheshout]

The Dystopian Lake Filled by the World’s Tech Lust

Hidden in an unknown corner of Inner Mongolia is a toxic, nightmarish lake created by our thirst for smartphones, consumer gadgets and green tech, discovers Tim Maughan.

[kraftwerk-porridge]

Unknown Fields Division is a design studio - an offshoot of the Architectural Association School of Architecture - comprised of writers, filmmakers, artists and architects that documents the strange landscapes and ecologies in which consumer society is made possible. Kind of like a “How It’s Made” for the materials of future industrial production. In this latest showreel they travel through Bolivian salt fields where lithium is mined - these will be the oil fields of the 21st century if and when the green-electrical energy revolution takes place.

Their stated outlook is that of science-fiction soothsayers in some sort of J.G. Ballardian sense - finding the signposts to our alien future embedded in the present. Sometimes this will manifest in actual sci-fi, like in this short film - perhaps a little blunt but a good indication of their global-capitalism-enfolding-social-experience outlook.

[thnkngstrc-blog]

The Unknown Fields Division is a nomadic design studio that ventures out on expeditions to the ends of the earth to bear witness to alternative worlds, alien landscapes, industrial ecologies and precarious wilderness.

[technolowgy]

Unknown Fields Division Showreel 2013

The Unknown Fields Division is a nomadic design studio that ventures out on expeditions to the ends of the earth to explore peripheral landscapes, industrial ecologies and precarious wilderness. These 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. They are the dislocated hinterlands that lie behind the scenes of modern cities. Each year we navigate a different trajectory as we seek to map the complex and contradictory realities of the present as a site of strange and extraordinary futures.

Here we are both visionaries and reporters, part documentarians and part science fiction soothsayers as the otherworldly sites we encounter afford us a distanced viewpoint from which to survey the consequences of emerging environmental and technological scenarios.

Join the division for our next expedition. unknownfieldsdivision.com aaschool.ac.uk/unknownfields

The Unknown Field Division is coordinated by Liam Young and Kate Davies.

[robertogreco]

_[Unknown Fields Division Showreel 2013](https://vimeo.com/66692318)_, Liam Young > The [Unknown Fields Division](http://www.unknownfieldsdivision.com/) is a nomadic design studio that ventures out on expeditions to the ends of the earth to explore peripheral landscapes, industrial ecologies and precarious wilderness. These 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. They are the dislocated hinterlands that lie behind the scenes of modern cities. Each year we navigate a different trajectory as we seek to map the complex and contradictory realities of the present as a site of strange and extraordinary futures. > Here we are both visionaries and reporters, part documentarians and part science fiction soothsayers as the otherworldly sites we encounter afford us a distanced viewpoint from which to survey the consequences of emerging environmental and technological scenarios. Join them for [Treasured Island, Madagascar Expedition](2013http://www.aaschool.ac.uk/STUDY/VISITING/unknownfields): 14 days, mid-July to end-July, this summer, 2013.