Diploma 6 - the ‘Unknown Fields Division’ - is a nomadic design studio that ventures out on annual expeditions to the ends of the earth to explore peripheral landscapes, industrial ecologies and precarious wilderness.
This year we travelled from rain-soaked forests to parched flat earth, through the energy rich landscapes of the Bolivian Amazon and the Atacama Desert. Here the ground is charged with potential, for below the mirror-like surface of the world’s largest salt flat, Salar De Uyuni, is a grey gold called Lithium, a material which epitomises a burgeoning new era of electric fuel.
Unknown Fields chronicled these resource landscapes, investigating the infrastructures that serve as energy conduits, translating matter like a luminous language - from a hole in the ground to the glow of our phones - to trace a wild journey of electrons from the radiant gizmos of our familiar city deep into landscapes far, far away.
In the bright white light of the salt flats, Eleanore of our Mythic Industries Department has initiated a carnival of adorned mining machines and decorative gas masks to celebrate a new alliance between Lithium companies and indigenous landowners, while Natali’s Intentional Fossils Lab has preserved the violence of a Dakar Rally crash with a 10,000-year-old monument to our petrochemical fetish. As part of our Invisible Territories Division Mikhaila encoded a new cultural territory in the derelict bandwidth of the electromagnetic spectrum, and Addison traced one of Paris Hilton’s instagram posts about a new handbag all the way to the national park it created in the Bolivian Amazon. Jason, of our Accident Design Bureau, has choreographed the collapse of ‘the mountain that eats men’ and instigated its eternal rebuilding as a macabre tourist attraction. Lara of the Centre for Floral Mining has researched the flower species that bloom in the presence of metals to reimagine mine sites as exotic gardens. In our Department of Speculative Energy Nicholas takes us on a journey along Elon Musk’s Gigaloop to witness a future in which batteries have become the scarce resource. Meanwhile Kassandra has dreamt up history’s largest solar farm, a modern-day Eldorado that sacrifices all of Chile to power our entire planet.
[www.unknownfieldsdivision.com]
Motion Designer Oliviu Lugojan-Ghenciu
Screenwriter Tim Maughan
Animator Dave Ferner
Filmmaker Carlos Casas
Sound Designer Aneek Thapar
Photographer Toby Smith
Lawyer Alonso Barros
The indigenous communities of Peine in the Atacama and Santa Rosa in the Amazon
ALMA Radio Telescope Observatory
Rockwood Lithium Mine
San Cristobal Silver Mine
The capable drivers of Imbex Bolivian 4WD
The petrol-fuelled daredevils of the Dakar Rally
Liam Young is an architect who operates in the spaces between design, fiction and futures. He is founder of the think tank Tomorrows Thoughts Today, a group whose work explores the possibilities of fantastic, perverse and imaginary urbanisms. Their projects develop fictional speculations as critical instruments to survey the conse- quences of emerging environmental and technological futures.
Kate Davies is a designer, writer and educator. She is cofounder of the multidisciplinary group LiquidFactory and makes objects, narrative work, films and installations that deal with obscure territories of occupation. Her current work explores the psychology of extreme landscapes and the meaning of wilderness. She has taught at London Metropolitan University, the Bartlett School of Architecture and Chelsea College of Art and Design and regularly runs international design workshops. She is he Director of the AA's Media Studies programme.
