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 it has brought into being. Tales from the Dark Side of the City is a series that forms an atlas to the territories and stories of a city that stretches across the entire planet. Sitting between documentary and fiction, this is 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. These books 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 head off on a dust-blown road trip across Australia. Here, in the vast interior of this remote island continent, 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. Unknown Fields travel 1km beneath the surface of the earth to find gold, surveying and laser-scanning the incisions that release it from the ground. These massive excavations are cut through the narrative landscape of the Dreamtime, the creation mythology of 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.

9781907896859, 2016
24 × 17cm, illustrated, 64pp, paperback