UNKNOWN FIELDS: THE DARK SIDE OF THE CITY Review

While maintaining a somewhat unbiased position while exposing these truths, the careful, deliberate, and uniquely edited quality of the films couldn’t help but bare the gritty realities of some of the world’s most powerful systems. Focusing on six different expeditions undertaken by the research studio, a narrative was formed that connected investigations from large ship container ports and the toxic waste production of China, to huge gold mine pits in Australia, to Lithium lakes in Bolivia, to Area 51 and its mysteries in the USA, to the sapphire trade in Tasmania which is thriving on the back of cheap labour, or to Alaska, a place being drastically affected by climate change.

Unknown Fields have used a variety of journalistic techniques such as hidden cameras, drones, concealed microphones, and interviews, yet Liam and Kate emphasised that their ambition was not to generate an exposé of industrial practices but rather to study them as designers and architects, questioning what can be done about such issues, with the objective being to understand how they could affect the global “interconnected city”.

Alongside the lecture, a life-size steel-frame ‘bus’, accompanied by curious experiments in glass vitrines and a film splicing snippets from their various quests, was until recently exhibited in the Gallery at no. 36 Bedford Square. It exposed visitors to yet another dimension of the duo’s work, giving the audience a 1:1 taste of not only the expeditions themselves, but a tangible experience of life behind the lens of an explorer and researcher; sitting in the bus, out on the trail to uncover some of the world’s darkest secrets.

The work of Unknown Fields raises questions that are difficult to grasp let alone answer. Questions such as how a harmless remote-controlled toy helicopter is a culprit for increased toxic waste levels in China, or how an electric car proposed by an enigmatic entrepreneur as an alternative to petrol-driven vehicles will drastically change a country’s landscape. This ability to create connections between seemingly disparate occurrences across geographic distances is what propels their research forward and gives it wider meaning.