ARCHITECTURE

Tales From The Dark Side Of The City - Unknown Fields. Boxset Of 6 titles
Architectural Association 2016 ISBN 9781907896903 Acqn 29947
Pb 17x25cm 384pp ills £40

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. Tales from the Dark Side of the City is a book series that
forms 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. They 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.

The series includes stories developed from expeditions through Bolivia and the Atacama Desert,
the Western Australian Outback, the South China Sea and Inner Mongolia, the gemfields of
Madagascar, Far North Alaska and the black sites of the United States.

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 ARCHITECTURE

Tales from the Dark Side of the City – The Breastmilk of the Volcano
Architectural Association 2016 ISBN 9781907896842 Acqn 30005
Pb 17x24cm 64pp ills £7

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. Tales from the Dark Side of the City is a book series that
forms 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. They 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.

Over half of the world's reserves of lithium - a key ingredient in batteries - lie under the ethereal
inverted skies of the Salar De Uyuni in Bolivia. If the future is electric then the future is here, lying
in wait for the world. For The Breastmilk of the Volcano Unknown Fields chase the grey rush
across the shimmering white expanse of this ancient salt flat which, according to traditional
indigenous narrative, was created from the breast milk of a weeping volcano. This book is an
account of a contemporary creation story for our energy, from the Big Bang to the battery, from
the birth of lithium at the beginning of the universe to the low power warning flashing on our
screens. We power our future with the breast milk of volcanoes.

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 ARCHITECTURE

Tales from the Dark Side of the City - A World Adrift

Architectural Association 2016 ISBN 9781907896866 Acqn 30289
Pb 17x24cm 64pp ills £7

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. Tales from the Dark Side of the City is a book series that
forms 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. They 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.

For A World Adrift Unknown Fields travel through Asia and beyond, tracing the shadows of the
world's desires along the supply chains and cargo routes of the South China Sea to explore the
dispersed choreographies and atomised geographies that the globalised city brings into being.
This book is a collection of conversations and images from Unknown Fields' journey. From sea to
source, we follow the routes of bits, bobs and thingamajigs in reverse and chart their unmaking,
from container ship back through wholesalers and manufacturers and ending at the banks of the
sludge-filled radioactive lake in Inner Mongolia where most of our technologies begin their lives.

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 ARCHITECTURE

Tales from the Dark Side of the City – Snowing in the Supercomputer
Architectural Association 2016 ISBN 9781907896880 Acqn 30377
Pb 17x24cm 64pp col ills £7

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. Tales from the Dark Side of the City is a book series that
forms 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. They 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.

For Snowing in the Supercomputer Unknown Fields locate the environmental forecasts and data
landscapes of the city and travel to Alaska's far north, to visit a territory that sits in the collective
imagination as one of the last remaining wildernesses. Unknown Fields spend the winter solstice
with climate scientists from around the world who are camped out in the most northern cities on
the planet to collect data that is fed into the climate-modelling supercomputers and environmental
policies further south. Traditional data visualisations and guilt-laden headlines may no longer be
sufficient strategies to encourage the cultural shift now required. In this book Unknown Fields
peers inside the supercomputer to find a set of surreal landscapes that sit between tradition and
technology, the real and the imagined, the present and the future. They are landscapes given
new narratives by native Alaskan authors and generated from the climate data and modelling
software of supercomputer scientists. Against these images run panoramas of the supercomputer
infrastructure that simulates them and the doomsday statistics that are shouted at us everyday,
but that we do our best to ignore.

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 ARCHITECTURE

Tales from the Dark Side of the City - Treasure Island

Architectural Association 2016 ISBN 9781907896873 Acqn 30454
Pb 17x24cm 64pp ills £7

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. Tales from the Dark Side of the City is a book series that
forms 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. They 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.

In Treasured Island Unknown Fields travels through Madagascar to catalogue the push and pull
of economy and ecology and meet the illegal traders of the world's luxury brands. In times past
an anarchist community of pirates called Madagascar home. It was an island beyond the law and
off the map, a place of rogues, booty and bounties. This book unravels the contemporary black
market supply chain that strings the precious gem stones from the wild west mining towns of
Madagascar to the celebrity necklines and trembling newlywed fingers of the city. One of the
planet's most precious ecological treasures is home to one of its poorest nations and in the
shadows of the world's desires we uncover some of the complex value negotiations that play out
across this unique island.

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 ARCHITECTURE

Tales from the Dark Side of the City - High Strange

Architectural Association 2016 ISBN 9781907896897 Acqn 30464
Pb 17x24cm 64pp ills £7

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. Tales from the Dark Side of the City is a book series that
forms 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. They 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.

To chart the black sites of the Unknown Fields city the studio commandeers an old US school bus
and heads off on a reconnaissance trip through the borderlands of military outposts and the
crater-pocked, fenced-off folkloric landscapes of the United States. The militarised landscapes
which defend the city are hidden behind barbed wire, within inhospitable terrain or beneath the
low resolution distortions of doctored satellite images and beyond their physical might, they are
sites of psychological warfare, where rumour begins. High Strange is a graphic novel developed
together with embedded comic artist Kristian Donaldson in response to the material Unknown
Fields collected along this journey. It is a portrait of a landscape as a factory of fictions. A form of
weaponised folklore. A territory that can be only understood by examining the stories the world
tells about it.

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 ARCHITECTURE

Tales from the Dark Side of the City - Never Never Lands
Architectural Association 2016 ISBN 9781907896859 Acqn 30469
Pb 17x24cm 64pp ills £7

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. Tales from the Dark Side of the City is a book series that
forms 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. They 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.

In Never Never Lands Unknown Fields chronicle the creation stories of the city and head off on a
dust-blown road trip across Australia, into the vast and mysterious interior of this remote island
continent in search of its ancient tribal hinterlands and its immense techno-landscapes. Here, in
the Never Never, are the resource territories of the city, a land of rich geology, endless horizons
and mining pits so large that they generate their own weather systems. For this book, Unknown
Fields travel 1km beneath the surface of the earth to find gold and to survey and laser-scan the
technological incisions that release it from the ground. These massive excavations are cut
through the narrative landscape of the Dreamtime, the creation mythology of the Aboriginal
Australians. Stories from two indigenous authors act as our Dreamtime guide as we drift across
the grounds of traditional creation, before diving deep to follow a new subterranean songline, one
created from underground mine computer models and laser survey data. Roughly 0.034grams of
this landscape is locked away in each of our mobile phones, charged and quietly vibrating. We all
carry a little piece of Australia in our pockets.

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