“The Unknown Fields Division is a nomadic design research 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. These distant 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. In such a landscape of interwoven narratives, the studio uses film and animation to chronicle this network of hidden stories and re-imagine 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.Previous expeditions include; The Texaco oil fields of the Ecuadorian Amazon; the Galapagos Islands; Area 51 and other US military outposts; A Container Ship across the South China Sea; Madagascar’s ‘wild west’ sapphire pits, The frozen Arctic sea ice, far north Alaska; The Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, Ukraine; Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, the gold fields of the Western Australian outback and Rare earth mining in Bayan Obo, Inner Mongolia.”

Video & text: Unknown Fields.