Tomorrows Thoughts Today’s Liam Young and long time collaborator Kate Davies run the Unknown Fields Division. Unknown Fields have launched a new project called Rare Earthenware, developed for the ‘What is Luxury’exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.

While journeys to extraordinary places are the cornerstone of luxury travel, this project follows more well-concealed journeys taking place across global supply chains. It retraces rare earth elements, which are widely used in high-end electronics and green technologies, to their origins. A film of the project, developed in collaboration with photographer Toby Smith is composed as a single panning shot along a planetary scaled conveyor belt, documents their voyage in reverse from container ships and ports, wholesalers and factories, back to the banks of a barely-liquid radioactive lake in Inner Mongolia, pumped with tailings from the refining process. To accompany the film, Unknown Fields Division have used mud from this lake to craft a set of three ceramic vessels. Each is proportioned as a traditional Ming vase and is made from the amount of toxic waste created in the production of three items of technology – a smartphone, a featherweight laptop and the cell of a smart car battery.

You can watch the full ‘Rare Earthenware’ film exclusively on our project page at the Guardian

The finished vases are made from the exact amount of toxic waste produced in the manufacture of 3 objects of technology- the smartphone, the laptop and the electric car battery cell. Film Still © Toby Smith/Unknown Fields

Unknown Fields collecting radioactive tailings material from besides the worlds Largest Rare Earth minerals refinery in Inner Mongolia. Film Still © Toby Smith/Unknown Fields

Radiation scientists test the toxic clay collected from the tailings lake and find it to be 3 times background radiation. Film Still © Toby Smith/Unknown Fields

The amount of toxic clay produced in the manufacture of a single smart phone is moulded into a traditional Ming vase form. Film Still © Toby Smith/Unknown Fields

A Chinese factory worker assembles the components of our tech gadgets along a conveyor belt that stretches from Inner Mongolia to a London retail store. Film Still © Toby Smith/Unknown Fields

Rare Earthenware by Unknown Fields. Film and Photography in collaboration with Toby Smith, Ceramics assistance from Kevin Kevin Callaghan, Animation assistance from Christina Varvia

Applications for the Summer 2015 expedition close on May 01

The Unknown Fields Division is a nomadic design 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.

We are inviting you to join us for our Summer expedition, to work alongside international collaborators from the worlds of film, science, technology and fiction and travel through the Lithium Fields of Bolivia and the Atacama Desert. The Unknown Fields summer expedition is open to all architects, designers, artists, writers and interested parties, students or professionals.

For our Summer Expedition 2015 we map a landscape spectrum spanning rain soaked forests to parched flat earth as we blaze a trail from the Bolivian Amazon to the Atacama Desert. In the heart of Bolivia, we will bear witness to a site, which epitomizes a burgeoning new era of electric fuel. We chase the grey rush to Salar de Uyuni, where under ethereal inverted skies lies over half of the world’s reserves of Lithium. Buried here, beneath the mirror of the world’s largest salt flat, is a grey gold – a substance in every one of our pockets, in every gleaming device, and every electric car. Where a gear-shift in human technological development has rendered this landscape one of the most sought after on earth. This is the feeding ground of the new green energy revolution. If the future is electric then the future is here, lying in wait for the world. Our journey will take us to celebrated landscapes like these, the future of which is dictated by worlds beyond their spectacular horizons. From the salt flats we will drift through the Amazon, in search of the lost cities of the forest, and whispered tales of El Dorado, another gold rush long consumed by the trees. We climb to the top of the world, the highest city on the planet; the Bolivian capital of La Paz and we head down to the bed of a long lost sea; the Atacama desert. If the Bolivian salt flats are mirrors to the sky above then the Atacama is a mirror reflecting its possible future, for it is a site that has witnessed by hundreds of years of copper and nitrate mining. We will see this exhausted ground stripped bare and disappearing on the wind. From these dust clouds the Unknown Fields division of speculators, and prospectors will imagine the many futures of Bolivia’s charged ground. A ground of possibility, and potential, on the verge of change – a proving ground in a state of becoming.

Fees- All inclusive Workshop and Expedition fee: £1900. Participants are required to make their own way to meet Unknown Fields at the expedition starting point in Santiago, Chile on July 22nd.

For more details read below

Fee includes

- 18 days travelling and working alongside specialists from the fields of architecture, art, technology and film. Collaborating on the production of a publication and film.

- Meetings and discussions with experts on the ground and in the field.

- A schedule of visits to natural, technological and industrial sites, including- The Salar de Uyuni salt flat, Lithium extraction fields, Large scale open pit mining operation, Atacama Desert, High altitude astronomical observatory, Geothermal landscapes, Communities in the Bolivian Amazon Rainforest

- Domestic flights within Chile and Bolivia

- All on the ground transportation [bus, 4WD, river canoe]

- All accommodation

- All entrance fees, camping fees and National Park fees etc.

- Comprehensive travel insurance – medical and personal belongings

To apply and for further details see our Unknow Fields website

Unknown Fields is a part of the Architectural Associations Visiting School Program and participants will recieve membership to the Association as well as AA accreditation for participating in the workshop

Available to download now- 1,49€ (iTunes), 1,78€ (Amazon)*

Brave New Now is a collection of specially commissioned short stories set in a fictional future city developed by speculative architect Liam Young for the 2013 Lisbon Architecture Triennale. Authors have been invited to inhabit the city, to breathe life into its characters and cultures and give form to its streets and spaces through narrative. It is a speculative urbanism, an exaggerated present, in which we can imagine the wonders and possibilities of emerging biological and technological research. Authors include Warren Ellis, Bruce Sterling, Tim Maughan, Jonathan Dotse, Rachel Armstrong, Samit Basuand Anil Menon.  These speculative fictions are illustrated with a collection of photographs of the present, gathered from a group of photographers who venture out into the world documenting the weak signals and emerging phenomena that have been extrapolated into our imaginary city. In Brave New Now it is not clear what is fact and what is fiction, but rather the two productively intertwine.  The two modes of working sit side by side and we slip suggestively between the real and the imagined, between the documentary and the visionary, where speculative fictions become a way of exploring a world that the everyday struggles to grasp.

The future is not something that washes over us like water, it is something we must actively shape and define. Some of the people we meet in the Brave New Now are swept up in what the city could be, others are reserved and look on with caution. It is a place of wonder and of fear. We meet friends and strangers, we hear their stories, and we imagine our own life here. We have not walked these streets before, what things may come, in the Brave New Now.

Preview of ebook foreword

Brave New Now
Editor: Liam Young
Authors: Warren Ellis, Tim Maughan, Jonathan Dotse, Bruce Sterling, Rachel Armstrong, Samit Basu, Anil Menon.
Photographers: Michael Wolf, Greg Girard, Neil Chowdhury, Vincent Fournier, Thomas Weinberger, Charlie Koolhaas, Greg White, Daniel Beltrá, Victoria Sambunaris, Christina Seely, Brice Richard, Bas Princen.
Concept Art: Daniel Dociu, Hoving Alahaidoyan.

“A projective fiction is a critical tool that is both an extraordinary vision of tomorrow and a provocative examination of the pertinent questions facing us today.” Liam Young

This digital publication was commissioned by Close, Closer chief curator Beatrice Galilee, Art Direction by Zak Group and graphic design by Raquel Pinto.
*The support of The British Council has enabled a discounted distribution price of Brave New Now ebook.

Human activity has irreversibly changed the composition of the atmosphere, the oceans, and even the Earth’s crust. Humanity has become a geological force. Consequently, the perspective has shifted from humans at the centre of the world to the forces that act on timescales beyond the conceivable. These ideas challenge us to rethink our attachments to the world, and our concepts of nature, culture and ecology. With this book Sonic Acts examines how art and science map and document new insights, and how the changes and transformations that occur on a geological scale can become something humans can feel, touch, and experience.

The Geologic Imagination features new essays by Timothy Morton, Douglas Kahn, Paul Bogard, Michael Welland, and Raviv Ganchrow; there are interviews with Dipesh Chakrabarty, Matthew Coolidge, Liam Young, Noortje Marres, Kodwo Eshun, Kurt Hentschläger, and Mario de Vega; and visual contributions by Femke Herregraven,Mirna Belina, Ellsworth & Kruse, the Center of Land Use Interpretation, Marijn de Jong, and BJ Nilsen & Karl Lemieux.

You can read a few fragments from Tim Maughan that didn’t make it into the final piece-

Liam: Because like I was saying, it is quite extraordinary, like I was talking about the technological sublime. We see it in all these places we go to, we stand at the world’s largest gold mine, it’s a hole in the ground the size of the Grand Canyon, so big it generates its own weather system and planes have to divert around it otherwise they’re sucked into the wind vortex that it creates. We’ve done this…we’ve built the machines that have dug this fucking hole. People travel from all over the world to go and see the Grand Canyon, to go to this fucking hole in the ground. It’s the same kind of thing, it’s actually more impressive because that took millions of years of wind and rain and erosion to create it and we did this in 15 years ‑ that’s pretty amazing. So we used to paint the sublime which was about the fear and order of nature, and now we have the technological sublime where we approach the same kind of landscapes, we have the same kind of feelings about technological and industrial landscapes that we once did looking across the savanna, or looking across the grand canyon, or standing on a peak and seeing the amazon jungle unfolding in front of us. We stand underneath of a crane in a mega-port and we have that same sense of awe and wonder.

Tim: I was standing on the bridge, and the lights on one of them suddenly fired up and it slowly passed over me…a dozen little suns beaming on me, bringing daylight to the night.

Liam: And you get fucking goose bumps, you know what I mean? Like the artificial night when you see a factory on the horizon…it creates this strange kind of synthetic aurora and it’s desolate ‑ it’s utterly seductive. That’s our era’s great art…people used to do the Nazca Lines and we go to the oil pipelines.

Tim: That’s funny you say that because I went to Machu Picchu back in April, and it was fantastic. And then a few weeks later I went to Detroit. And that was fantastic too. And they both seemed strangely similar to me. And I couldn’t quite decide which impressed me more.

Liam: [laughs]

Tim: And they’re two of the same things, right?

Liam: Yeah. Two ruins of a civilisation.

Loop 6o hz Making of Documentry

A flock of autonomous DJI copters are programmed as aerial dancers and are mounted with specially engineered wireless speakers to broadcast the instruments of the band. Other copters are dressed in elaborate costumes to disguise their form and reflect light across the audience below. Against a score of original compositions and selected tracks from Cale’s seminal career this collaboration with Young imagines the possibilities of the drones as emerging cultural objects. If these technologies are no longer unseen objects overhead, or propelled along classified flight paths but brought into close and intimate relations with us then how might we see them differently. When their transmission fades, when the drones lose their signal and without their protocols for terror and surveillance, do they drop from the sky, do they fall in love or do the drones drift endlessly, forever on loop.

Watch the Bevis Bowden’s film cataloguing the Barbican performance on the 12 & 13 September 2014 and the making of documentary produced by The Creators Project that chronicles the teams development of  a new ultrasonic tracking system that supported autonomous drone flight and programmed choreographies and the design of drone couture costumes.

Interactive Digital Environment

To support the live performance and allow remote experiences of the drone orchestra project, Liam Young and John Cale also joined forces with digital artists FIELD to develop an accompanying online interactive environment- City of Drones. Charting the story of a lost drone drifting through an abstract vertical cityscape, players are invited to pilot a virtual craft and remotely explore this imaginary world. The machine vision of the drone reduces the city to pure geometry as flightpath algorithms plot courses along the narrow streets. Samples from Cale’s original soundscape compositions, developed for the live performance, echo across the landscape and we see the city through the eyes of the drone, buzzing between the buildings, drifting endlessly, in an ambient audio visual choreography.

Loop 60Hz Credit List

Liam Young

Andreas Müller software lead

Keri Elmsly producer

Aymie Backler project manager

Denis Stratton lead pilot

Liam Young with Universal Assembly Unit costume design

John Cale

Nita Scott producer

Dustin Boyer project engineer

Rob Verschoor FOH sound engineer

Eric De Bie monitor engineer

Rob Donnelly Jackson surround sound engineer

TEAM ARM pre-production

Ralph Esposito pre-production lead

ARM Studios, Los Angeles studio/rehearsal facilities

costume production team

Samantha Lee, Oliviu Lugojan-Ghenciu,

Zhan Wang, Harry Kay, William Gowland,

Dimi Constantinides, Quiddale O’Sullivan,

Jennifer Chen, Chris Cooper, Charlie Carr

Gomm, Panja Göbel, Richard Strange

pilots

Oliviu Lugojan-Ghenciu, Alan Perin,

Ayhan Dawood, Dan Bishop

Philip Tarry drone technician

Dan Terry lighting design

Interactive Environment

John Cale and Liam Young with FIELD

Opening on October 4th at Z33 in Belgium, Future Fictions. Perspectives on worldbuilding explores how contemporary artists, designers and architects relate to future thinking and imaging: from map-ping, questioning and criticizing, to developing complex visions about the structures and systems that may shape our life in the future. Tomorrows Thoughts Today’s Liam Young will première a 3 screen projection work ‘New City’, a series of near future city skylines. New City is a collaboration with the authors Jeff Noon, Pat Cadigan and Tim Maughan and musicians Coldcut.

With these visions/fictions, Z33 wishes to shift the debate away from what is possible, plausible and probable towards what is preferable: Future Fictions there-fore is essentially a project about ideas and ideals, about dreams beyond hope and fear. Can we learn to critically assess the future visions presented? Which criteria would be valid in doing so?  In other words, can we learn to become ‘future literate’? Other artists include Dunne & Raby, Atelier Van Lieshout, Near Future Laboratory and many more. Curated by Karen Verschooren. Photo credit Kristof Vrancken/Z33

New City is a series of animated skylines of the near future developed by Tomorrow’s Thought Today’s Liam Young. In intricate 5k detail they depict a speculative urbanism, an exaggerated version of the present, in which we can project new cultural trends, environmental, political and economic forces. Photographs taken on expeditions around the world with nomadic studio Unknown Fields, to document these emerging phenomena and weak signals have been meticulously stitched together and extrapolated to form each city skyline. In this way ‘New City’ slips between the real and the imagined, between the documentary and the visionary, where speculative fictions become a way of exploring a world that the everyday struggles to grasp. To accompany the animations the authors Jeff Noon, Pat Cadigan and Tim Maughan have been invited to write a story for each skyline, to breathe life into its characters and cultures and give form to its streets and spaces through a suggestive narrative fragment. Original New City soundscapes have been developed by Coldcut. The animations have been commissioned by Z33 and are screening as part of ‘Future Fictions’.

This skyline is narrated by Tim Maughan and is titled “Keeping Up Appearances”. Read the short story below. 

Duri drops the Samsung Galaxy SX phone onto the kitchen table, hears it chime softly as it makes contact with the paper-thin Samsung Qi SmartPower charging mat.
-Honey, what’s that cardboard tube in the hallway?
Sang’s voice comes back from the lounge, muffled by the low hum of the Samsung AHT24WGMEA/XSG air conditioner.
-That’s the TV, come and see-
-What?
-It’s the packaging the new TV came in. I’ve just hung it. Come in here and see!
Duri pushes open the door to an explosion of pixels the width of the room; an ultra high def orgy of thrown paint and 4K rainbow ejaculate soiling pristine whitespace. White turns to black, paint to fireworks, stars flicker and become city lights, a forest of pastel shaded, corporate branded condo-blocks emerging from the night, as the final strains of the orchestral score fade into the air-con’s never ending drone.
Sang waits until the TV’s start-up and calibration routine has finished before turning to Duri, idiotic childish glee filling approval-seeking eyes.
-Nice, huh?
-Yeah. It’s great. But why does it say LG on it?
-Because… it’s made by LG?
-Move it. Now.
Sang looks confused, almost hurt.
-The TV?
-The packaging first. Get it out of the hallway. Bring it in here. Now.
-What? But they’re coming to get the recycling tonight-
-Exactly. Get it in here before anybody sees it.
Duri curses silently for trusting Sang with such an important consumer decision, anxiously glancing at the feed from the hallway’s Samsung SND-6011R dome camera via a Samsung SmartGear 7 Neo wristwatch.
-Christ, who knows who’s seen it already… I just hope nobody from the building standards committee is back from work yet…
-Baby…
-Don’t baby me. Are you trying to get us thrown out? Our lease is up for review in three months and you brought an LG TV into a Samsung housing block? What the hell will the neighbours say?

New City
Liam Young
Tomorrows Thoughts Today

Project Team
Alexey Marfin
Zhan Wang

Soundscapes by Coldcut with additional sound design by Aneek Thapar

Authors
Jeff Noon
Pat Cadigan
Tim Maughan

Curated by Karen Verschooren and produced for Z33, Future Fictions Exhibition

New City is a series of animated skylines of the near future developed by Tomorrow’s Thought Today’s Liam Young. In intricate 5k detail they depict a speculative urbanism, an exaggerated version of the present, in which we can project new cultural trends, environmental, political and economic forces. Photographs taken on expeditions around the world with nomadic studio Unknown Fields, to document these emerging phenomena and weak signals have been meticulously stitched together and extrapolated to form each city skyline. In this way ‘New City’ slips between the real and the imagined, between the documentary and the visionary, where speculative fictions become a way of exploring a world that the everyday struggles to grasp. To accompany the animations the authors Jeff Noon, Pat Cadigan and Tim Maughan have been invited to write a story for each skyline, to breathe life into its characters and cultures and give form to its streets and spaces through a suggestive narrative fragment. Original New City soundscapes have been developed by Coldcut. The animations have been commissioned by Z33 and are screening as part of ‘Future Fictions’.

This skyline is narrated by Pat Cadigan and is titled The City in the Sea. Read the short story below. 

Those silly yellow ducks came back from West GP, showing up right after one dog bell. Kids were so eager to see the Westies’ answering messages, they started jumping into the water, bobbing around with their floaties and tangling their tethers. Kids old enough to know better did, too. If I hadn’t had dog watch on the still, I mighta jumped in myself even though fourteen makes me a pre-adult.

I was just so bored. Four days outa the last seven, I’ve drawn still duty–not my dream job. I want tek stream. My mentor Shesea claims the fresh water distillery is the perfect place for an aspiring tekkie. But Klick’s mentor told her it’s vital for her and Klick wants meteorology. I guess all the mentors have to say that to fill the rota; somebody’s got to make sure the plastic keeps crying. I can’t wait for monsoon season and we fill up on rainwater. The sea can get pretty choppy and last year we had some scary-big waves. But the advantage of living in a plastic city is, you wibble and wobble but you never sink.

My mother rode out the KaiHuKa, short for Kai Hula Kahiko–”ocean hula.” The storm was so bad and lasted so long, they cut the Patch into modules with no more than a dozen people each. Mam was little then but she says she remembers every moment of being strapped into big puffy inflatables with her brother, and how he got seasick and yakked all the time, not just from chop but because he knew everyone’s pee got saved for filtration. The water tasted just like still; it was knowing where it came from. Uncle Jahid tells it vice versa. Me, I think it was both of them.

Afterwards, the pilots homed in on the Big Buoy signal to reunite and restore the Patch. Not everybody made it; some drowned and washed up on one island or another, and one just vanished altogether. Some people didn’t want to stay and cut themselves loose again. A few wanted to abolish the Patch altogether and tried to blow it up. I don’t know what they were thinking–stuff would just accumulate in the same place and without anyone to make use of it, it would just be a lot of crap for marine life to get tangled up in or choke on.

The official story is, they got deported, airlifted out by some island’s coast guard. But there are whispers that a pilot took them into the North Pacific Gyre and cut them loose with nothing but a good luck charm and five days’ worth of food and water–no smart-map, no radio, not even a beacon.

I wouldn’t really want to see another KaiHuKa but I kinda like the idea of cutting the Patch into pieces and rearranging them. Looking at the sat-receiver array and the solar collectors, I know I could position all of them better. I made a model out of beads and plastic remnants and showed it to my mentor. Shesea said I showed promise but I had a lot more still shifts to go before I got my hands on actual hardware.

And they say we’re a more flexible society than landlubbers. Sometimes I wonder.

New City
Liam Young
Tomorrows Thoughts Today

Project Team
Alexey Marfin
Zhan Wang

Soundscapes by Coldcut with additional sound design by Aneek Thapar

Authors
Jeff Noon
Pat Cadigan
Tim Maughan

Curated by Karen Verschooren and produced for Z33, Future Fictions Exhibition

New City is a series of animated skylines of the near future developed by Tomorrow’s Thought Today’s Liam Young. In intricate 5k detail they depict a speculative urbanism, an exaggerated version of the present, in which we can project new cultural trends, environmental, political and economic forces. Photographs taken on expeditions around the world with nomadic studio Unknown Fields, to document these emerging phenomena and weak signals have been meticulously stitched together and extrapolated to form each city skyline. In this way ‘New City’ slips between the real and the imagined, between the documentary and the visionary, where speculative fictions become a way of exploring a world that the everyday struggles to grasp. To accompany the animations the authors Jeff Noon, Pat Cadigan and Tim Maughan have been invited to write a story for each skyline, to breathe life into its characters and cultures and give form to its streets and spaces through a suggestive narrative fragment. Original New City soundscapes have been developed by Coldcut. The animations have been commissioned by Z33 and are screening as part of ‘Future Fictions’.

This skyline is narrated by Jeff Noon and is titled Edgeland: The Symbiant. Read the short story below. 

I keep to the shadows of the township, fearful of being seen, a stranger.

The waste pits. This is where the digital world comes to die, and even at this time of night youngsters are digging for scraps of information, anything they can salvage and hope to sell on. Two of them are fighting over a morsel of text. I see the face of a one-time film star, a spectral mask floating in the air like insect silk.

A figure steps forward. Payment is made and I follow her in silence towards a row of sealed storage units. She breaks a padlock with a pair of cutters and then leaves me. My scanner bleeps. I’m close now, I can sense it. It’s dark inside and it takes my eyes a while to adjust. But then I see him, my symbiant. He’s sitting there, perfectly still, his body glowing with a faint blue light. My friend, I have not seen you in so long a time. His eyes flicker; I can only hope its recognition. Portions of his face are missing so I can see the hollowness within. It’s painful to witness. But the scars on his left wrist match my own exactly; we are both survivors of the same suicide. A few strands of fragile code in my scanner are the connecting tissue between us.

At the height of the digital era we all carried these phantoms with us: our downloaded selves given a semblance of life. We were symbiotic companions, each feeding off and supporting the other. But now, living in the aftermath of the system crash, we are bereft. Who would not do what I have done, following rumours of an almost perfect ethereal body found wandering at the city’s limits? A body with my name, and my face.

I take his hand and urge him to his feet. He’s weightless. It feels as though I’m touching at light itself, at colour. I retrace my steps, but a group of men are approaching. I fear these are his new owners, seeking to protect their asset. So I turn in the opposite direction. The men shout after us, but we are running now, away from the edgelands and into the fields beyond. A veil of mist closes around us.

I rest beside an abandoned caravan to catch my breath, and my ghost hovers before me. My face, his face. We touch our wrists at the old wound and fuse together, one inside the other. When I wake up some time later, lying on a fold-out bed, I have no sense at all of being separate. What now? We have yet to decide.

Looking back at the city’s skyline we see the ghosts rising from the outer regions, so many flickers of light, dots of colour, notes of music, images, words, fragments, drifting towards the vast shining edifices of the central zone and the financial district. The moon’s reflected blue sphere calls to them from each segment of polished glass.

New City
Liam Young
Tomorrows Thoughts Today

Project Team
Alexey Marfin
Zhan Wang

Soundscapes by Coldcut with additional sound design by Aneek Thapar

Authors
Jeff Noon
Pat Cadigan
Tim Maughan

Curated by Karen Verschooren and produced for Z33, Future Fictions Exhibition

For nearly 50 years, John Cale has thrived at the vanguard of a myriad of creative disciplines, from setting the stage for an underground, noise-bending attack on rock and roll with the Velvet Underground, to his current genre-bending music of today. In his urban futures practise Liam Young has been telling stories about the possibilities of drone technologies in the near future city. Typically associated with militarised applications, Young repurposes his collection of choreographed flying machines as both disembodied instruments and nomadic audio infrastructure, to create an immersive live music performance and visual spectacle.

Known for experimenting with technologies and industrial sounds in his music, Cale once tuned his instruments to the hum of refrigerator motors, the frequency of modernisation. For this new commission he joins forces with speculative architect and storyteller Liam Young to explore the soundscape of a new generation, the distant rumble of drone propellers for a digital landscape and a live performance for the barbican centre.

For The Space Cale and Young have joined forces with digital artists FIELD, who have developed an interactive digital landscape enjoyed as an online experience of the project. FIELD creates expressive audio-visual artworks – from digital paintings to high-end visual effects and generative design across all media, always looking for the drama in the code. Charting the story of a lost drone drifting through an abstract vertical cityscape, players are invited to pilot a virtual craft and remotely explore this imaginary world. The machine vision of the drone reduces the city to pure geometry as flightpath algorithms plot courses along the narrow streets. Samples from Cale’s original soundscape compositions echo across the landscape and we see the city through the eyes of the drone, buzzing between the buildings, drifting endlessly, in an ambient audio visual choreography.

You can read more about the live performance of the project here.

City of Drones is on display now at Digital Revolution – the Barbican’s immersive exhibition of art, design, film, music and videogames and Transmissions for the Drone Orchestra Performance is live at the Barbican Theatre on 11 & 12 September. You can book tickets here.

Loop, 60hz: Transmissions from the Drone Orchestra is an immersive live music and drone performance developed through a new collaboration between Tomorrows Thoughts Today’s Liam Young and musician John Cale, formerly of the Velvet Underground. John Cale, known for experimenting with different industrial sounds in his practice, once tuned his instruments to the hum of refrigerator motors. Cale in collaboration with Liam Young now explore the soundscape of a new generation, the distant rumble of drone propellers, to be set against the visual spectacle of Young’s choreographed flying machines. Typically associated with militarised applications, each drone is repurposed here as both disembodied instrument and dynamic audio infrastructure. The performance will be stage across two nights in the Barbican Theatre in London. Tickets are selling out fast. You can purchase tickets here.

[Image credits: top- Piper Ferguson. Bottom- Jonathan Gales]

Sign Up Here! Applications close June 6th. Open to All.

The Unknown Fields Division is a nomadic design studio that ventures out on expeditions to the ends of the earth to explore peripheral 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. Each year we navigate a different global supply chain and seek to map the complex and contradictory realities of the present as a site of strange and extraordinary futures. Past journeys have traversed the mines of Madagascar and the Australian outback, the faded nuclear futures of the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone and the black military technologies and conspiracy theorists of the Nevada desert and Burning Man Festival.

This year we travel East to ride the waves of massive container ships and trace the shadows of the world’s desires along supply chains and cargo routes, to explore the dispersed choreographies and atomised geographies that global sea trade brings into being. These are the contours of our distributed city, stretched around the earth from the hole in the ground to the high street shelf. Consignments of the precious and industrial, raw and refined, mechanical and alive, drift across infrastructural seas on vast Panamax, Aframax and Suezmax from cavernous factory floors via huge ports like Shanghai, Singapore and Busan and through the bottleneck excavations of Panama and Suez. Our journey to Asia will take us behind the scenes of our modern world, cutting a cross section through the secret lives of products, where intense pockets of activity in wildly unexpected places supply cultures far removed with the fulfilment of their every need and desire. Joining us on our journey will be international collaborators and specialists from the worlds of design, technology, science, art and fiction, and together we will form a travelling circus of research visits, field reportage, rolling discussions and impromptu tutorials that will be chronicled in a publication and film.

Eligibility- The Unknown Fields summer expedition is open to all architects, designers, artists, writers and interested parties, students or professionals. A portfolio or CV is not required, only the online application form and payment.

Fees- All inclusive Expedition fee: £1600, which includes flights from London, all internal transport, accommodation, entrance fees, meetings, consultants, workshops and all other group costs (excludes meals). Please note: If you are based in Asia you can meet Unknown Fields on location and we can arrange a reduced fee that excludes return flights from London.

+ £60 Architectural Association Membership. If you are already a member of the AA, this is not required.

contact info(at)unknownfieldsdivision.com with any questions.

Available to download now- 1,49€ (iTunes), 1,78€ (Amazon)*

Brave New Now is a collection of specially commissioned short stories set in a fictional future city developed by speculative architect Liam Young for the 2013 Lisbon Architecture Triennale. Authors have been invited to inhabit the city, to breathe life into its characters and cultures and give form to its streets and spaces through narrative. It is a speculative urbanism, an exaggerated present, in which we can imagine the wonders and possibilities of emerging biological and technological research. Authors include Warren Ellis, Bruce Sterling, Tim Maughan, Jonathan Dotse, Rachel Armstrong, Samit Basu and Anil Menon.  These speculative fictions are illustrated with a collection of photographs of the present, gathered from a group of photographers who venture out into the world documenting the weak signals and emerging phenomena that have been extrapolated into our imaginary city. In Brave New Now it is not clear what is fact and what is fiction, but rather the two productively intertwine.  The two modes of working sit side by side and we slip suggestively between the real and the imagined, between the documentary and the visionary, where speculative fictions become a way of exploring a world that the everyday struggles to grasp.

The future is not something that washes over us like water, it is something we must actively shape and define. Some of the people we meet in the Brave New Now are swept up in what the city could be, others are reserved and look on with caution. It is a place of wonder and of fear. We meet friends and strangers, we hear their stories, and we imagine our own life here. We have not walked these streets before, what things may come, in the Brave New Now.

Preview of ebook foreword

Brave New Now
Editor: Liam Young
Authors: Warren Ellis, Tim Maughan, Jonathan Dotse, Bruce Sterling, Rachel Armstrong, Samit Basu, Anil Menon.
Photographers: Michael Wolf, Greg Girard, Neil Chowdhury, Vincent Fournier, Thomas Weinberger, Charlie Koolhaas, Greg White, Daniel Beltrá, Victoria Sambunaris, Christina Seely, Brice Richard, Bas Princen.
Concept Art: Daniel Dociu, Hoving Alahaidoyan.

“A projective fiction is a critical tool that is both an extraordinary vision of tomorrow and a provocative examination of the pertinent questions facing us today.” Liam Young

This digital publication was commissioned by Close, Closer chief curator Beatrice Galilee, Art Direction by Zak Group and graphic design by Raquel Pinto.
*The support of The British Council has enabled a discounted distribution price of Brave New Now ebook.

On April 4 +5 Liam Young will be hosting  Data Drama: Crunching, Chunking and other Novel Data Technologies to Better Help us Escape From the Present at Princeton University School of Architecture. Across 2 days 20 speakers will be discussing the spatial possibilities and consequences of big data and the network. To accompany the presentations Andrew Blum, author of Tubes: A Journey to the Centre of the Internet, will be coordinating a field trip through the wilds of New Jersey to visit a series of local data centres and critical engineer Julian Oliver will be running a workshop on the tools and tactics for asserting and defending civil liberties in the networked domain. For details head over here where the event will also be live streamed. Use #datadrama to contribute to the conversation.

James Bridle [Artist and founder Of Dronestagram and the New Aesthetic]

Kevin Slavin [Founder of the Playful Systems group at MIT's Media Lab]

Tim Maughan [Science Fiction Author]

Ivan Poupyrev [Project leader at Google’s Advance Technologies and Projects Division]

Ben Lewis [Director of Google and the World Brain]

Kate Crawford [Principal Researcher, Microsoft Research and Visiting Professor, MIT Center for Civic Media]

Metahaven [Designers and Editors of Black Transparency: The right to know in the age of Mass Surveillance]

Joanne McNeil [Techno political Writer and Researcher]

Scanlab [Specialists in Large scale 3D laser scanning]

Benjamin Bratton [Director of The Center for Design and Geopolitics]

Carlo Ratti [Director of Senseable City Lab at MIT]

Usman Hasque [Founder of internet of things data infrastructure Pachube]

Adam Harvey [Countersurveillance fashion designer]

Mario Carpo [Architectural Historian]

Future Perfect is a fictional, future city. A think tank of scientists, technologists, designers, artists and science fiction authors have collectively developed this imaginary place, the landscapes that surround it and the stories it contains. The think tank included futurist Bruce Sterling, author Warren Ellis, scientist Rachel Armstrong, and many more. You can watch the public think tank archived on the projects vimeo channel. The following series of posts presents the Future Perfect exhibition- a stage set for a collection of fictions, movie set models, emerging infrastructures and design experiments that can be inhabited as immersive districts of the future city.  In this introductory post which outlines the vision of the project we see the early concept art developed with Daniel Dociu and Hovig Alahaidoyan.

Emerging in the shadows of the decaying towers of a post oil Dubai, geo engineered by climatologists and influenced by the imminent economic boom of the Indian subcontinent it is a terraformed urban island. A city that grows intuitively, a creature, living, breathing and computing, a seething ecology that is evolving as a new metropolitan megaform. A speculative urbanism, an exaggerated present, where we can explore the wonders and possibilities of emerging biological and technological research and envision the possible worlds we may want to build for ourselves.

For the future is not something that washes over us like water, it is a place we must actively shape and define. Through fictions we share ideas and we chronicle our hopes and fears, our deepest anxieties and our wildest fantasies. Some of us will be swept up in what the city could be, others will be reserved and look on with caution. We have not walked these streets before, what things may come, in a Future Perfect.

The future at the intersection of science and fiction

Using fiction as a speculative tool in conjunction with scientific research to probe the outer reaches of the realm of possibility, project collaborations were forged between designers, research divisions and authors to develop a constellation of five works and accompanying short stories that make up the districts of Future Perfect.

In the exhibition, visitors are invited to wander through them, reading messages embedded in the landscape, witnessing the increasingly responsive processes through which the city grows, self-regulates and communicates, scrutinizing a hybrid atmosphere where natural and man-made, digital and material, fact and fiction, become increasingly indistinct.

Bots drift across this inhabited geology, a dense accumulation of crevice rooms, and public valleys. Through the strata is threaded the tendrils of a complex circulatory system that feeds the moist surfaces of a vibrant endemic ecology where nature and technology intertwine and biology becomes a new economy. Supercomputers whistle and whir; a virtual city, a parallel city overlaid directly onto the physical turns everything into interface, everything into program. The city watches on, breathing, blinking.

Visitors begin their tour at the edges, in THE WILDS of the city. A new bioengineered species of pharmaceutical plants glisten under the light of its neon suns. Next they pass THE LOOMS, and their heads brush the webbed canopy of cable bots as they hum and spurt their nozzles across a section of virgin ground. It is a city that is grown rather than built, a computed territory, faceted and abstracted, endlessly reprinting itself as demand requires. Visitors push past a laser-scanned mountain in THE SUPERCOMPUTER as its radiant digital landscapes become more real than the ground beneath them. They gesture and a ghost iceberg parts, they wander through beyond the printing pools of THE GARMENT DISTRICT and the digital prosthetics hanging out to dry. As they come to THE LOOKOUT, Future Perfect unfurls in luminous detail in front of the visitors. They watch children playing running through the streets while the city struggles to keep up.

The short stories of Future Perfect have been collected in “BRAVE NEW NOW”, a book of original fictions set in the imaginary city and photography works. The ebook will be available for purchase shortly from close-closer.com and from the Apple and Kindle stores.

“BRAVE NEW NOW” features original fictions by Rachel Armstrong, Bruce Sterling, Tim Maughan, Warren Ellis, Anil Menon, Jonathan Dotse, Samit Basu and photography by Victoria Sambunaris, Michael Wolf, Greg White, Neil Choudary, Vincent Fournier, Dan Holdsworth, Thomas Weinberger, Brice Richard, Daniel Beltrá, Christina Seely, Greg Girard, Bas Princen, Charlie Koolhaas.

Future Perfect was produced for the Lisbon 2013 Architecture Triennale and is an evolution of Under Tomorrows Sky developed with MU, Eindhoven.

[Image Credits: All images by Hovig Alahaidoyan except image 3 +4 by Daniel Dociu]

Future Perfect is a fictional, future city. A think tank of scientists, technologists, designers, artists and science fiction authors have collectively developed this imaginary place, the landscapes that surround it and the stories it contains.  The following series of posts presents the Future Perfect exhibition- a stage set for a collection of fictions, movie set models, emerging infrastructures and design experiments that can be inhabited as immersive districts of the future city.  This post presents the Future Perfect Lookout, that spot up high in the city, where we lie on the hood of a car and from a clearing in the mist we scan across the city in luminous detail. The Lookout takes the form of a short film, Chupan Chapai, based on a story by Tim Maly, directed by Factory Fifteen and produced by Liam Young.

A film is projected from the lookout that follows a group of children as they play a game of “hide and seek” in Future Perfect. Shot on location in across India, we see through their eyes a near future heavily influenced by the imminent boom of the Indian subcontinent, an emerging technology and economic superpower. The control systems that now run traffic systems, power grids and financial networks sit in the shadows, out of sight but silently organising our lives. Deep in the substrate of Future Perfect is a supercomputer that regulates the city and everyone within it. Reminiscent of an exaggerated silent film, everyone interacts with their digital city through intricate signs and gesture control. As the children play they learn to hack the augmented streets evading their friends but getting lost in the hidden spaces they have unlocked. They must escape from a sentient city that no longer recognises them.

Future Perfect is a fictional, future city. A think tank of scientists, technologists, designers, artists and science fiction authors have collectively developed this imaginary place, the landscapes that surround it and the stories it contains.  The following series of posts presents the Future Perfect exhibition- a stage set for a collection of fictions, movie set models, emerging infrastructures and design experiments that can be inhabited as immersive districts of the future city.  This post presents the Future Perfect movie miniature stage set model. Working with special effects artists from such films as Alien, Sunshine and Blade Runner and borrowing from the disappearing techniques of physical film prop making Liam Young and his team have built a room sized movie miniature model of the city. Across the course of the project authors have inhabited the scale city as a stage set and developed a collection of characters, narratives, films and illustrations.

Emerging in the shadows of the decaying towers of a post oil Dubai, geo engineered by climatologists and influenced by the imminent economic boom of the Indian subcontinent it is a terraformed urban island. A city that is grown rather than built, a creature, living, breathing and computing, a seething ecology that has become a new metropolitan megaform. Bots drift across this inhabited geology, a dense accumulation of crevice rooms, and public valleys, slowly printing and reprinting, endlessly as demand requires.

Through the strata is threaded the tendrils of a complex circulatory system that feeds the moist surfaces of a vibrant endemic ecology where nature and technology intertwine and biology becomes a new economy. Supercomputers whistle and whir, a virtual city, a parallel city overlaid directly onto the physical turns everything into interface, everything into program. It is an imaginary landscape extrapolated from the wonders and possibilities of emerging biological and technological research. The city watches on, breathing, blinking.

Working with craftsman Gary Welch, who has previously done the lighting on Tim Burton’s stop motion animation models,  the miniature city has been wired with 1000 miniature bulbs that run on a 12 minute accelerated day and night cycle.

Like a real city, the model has been expanding and developing since it was first exhibited in Eindhoven in 2012. A series of city building workshops has grown the city, developed new areas and torn down others.

to see more photos keep reading

Future Perfect is a fictional, future city. A think tank of scientists, technologists, designers, artists and science fiction authors have collectively developed this imaginary place, the landscapes that surround it and the stories it contains.  The following series of posts presents the Future Perfect exhibition- a stage set for a collection of fictions, movie set models, emerging infrastructures and design experiments that can be inhabited as immersive districts of the future city.  This post presents the Future Perfect Garment District, developed with fashion designer and artist Bart Hess.

Our bodies are end­lessly photographed, monitored and laser scanned with millimetre precision. From this context of surveillance, facial recognition, avatars and virtual ghosts, we imagine a near future where digital static, distortions and glitches become a new form of ornament. For the youth tribes of Future Perfect the body is a site for adaption, augmentation and experimentation. They celebrate the corrup­tion of the body data by moulding within their costumery all the imperfections of a decaying scan file. Shimmering in the exhibition landscape is a network of geometric reflec­tive pools of molten wax. Their mirrored surface is broken by a body, suspended from a robotic harness, plunging into the liquid.

A crust of wax crystallises around its curves and folds, growing architectural forms, layer by layer, like a 3d printer drawing directly onto the skin. Slowly the body emerges, encased in a dripping wet readymade prosthetic. It is a physical glitch, a manifestation of corrupt data in motion, a digital artefact. They hang from hooks like a collection of strange beasts and frozen avatars. Body prints, imperfect and distorted and always utterly unique.

Photography by Catarina Botelho and Delfino Legnani.

Future Perfect is a fictional, future city. A think tank of scientists, technologists, designers, artists and science fiction authors have collectively developed this imaginary place, the landscapes that surround it and the stories it contains.  The following series of posts presents the Future Perfect exhibition- a stage set for a collection of fictions, movie set models, emerging infrastructures and design experiments that can be inhabited as immersive districts of the future city.  This post presents the Future Perfect Wilds, developed by artists Cohen Van Balen through their project Nowhere a Shadow. Watch as we let a live wolf stalk the landscape of the city.

There is no nature anymore. We are wandering a new kind of wilderness, where the line between biology and technology is becoming increasingly indistinguishable. Through genetic modification, engineered meat, cosmetic surgery and geo-engineering we are remaking our world from the scale of cells to the scale of continents. The woods, wild and mysteri­ous from afar, appear as a stage on which every element is considered. Genetically engineered plants, artifi­cially sustained, are hanging from the trees, embedded in the ecology yet detached from it.

Their scaffolding systems of gleaming steel and neon light sway in the wind, waiting. Grey wolves approach the struc­tures during the night to scratch their body on the steel branches. In an intri­cate arrangement of devised symbio­sis, the contraption takes on the role of host organism. The wolf’s move­ments generate electricity for the system, while the blueberries are engineered to contain rabies vaccine in its fruit to protect the animal from self-destruction. Cameras transmit footage of the wolf’s presence around the globe, adorned in invisible garlands of elec­tric display, to be enjoyed by those whose passion for the spectacle of wilderness sustains its survival.

Future Perfect is a fictional, future city. A think tank of scientists, technologists, designers, artists and science fiction authors have collectively developed this imaginary place, the landscapes that surround it and the stories it contains.  The following series of posts presents the Future Perfect exhibition- a stage set for a collection of fictions, movie set models, emerging infrastructures and design experiments that can be inhabited as immersive districts of the future city.  This post presents the Future Perfect Supercomputer, an interactive installation developed by artists Marshmallow Laser Feast.

Laid across the physical city is a virtual doppelganger, a ghost landscape of hyperlinks, geo tags, digital maps and satellite scans. The air is thick, charged with bits, bytes, electrons and energy fields. A network of tracking cameras follows us as we wander across this data city, our gestures and movements, translated and then beamed as dynamic forms of light that animate around us. Like flamboyant conductors, the audience interacts with an array of high powered projectors that give life to a luminous terrain of mountains, clouds and particles. By employing directional audio technology, a synthetic soundscape feels almost real, conjuring a visceral experience of a world currently hidden in screens, circuits and hardware.

Follow paths of sound, listen for the edge of a surface, see it shimmer, and drift right through, like a rock falling in the sea. It is a new model for interfacing with technology and the invisible world that completely envelopes us- an inhabitable visualisation of the digital that glows in the haze and then flickers into darkness.

The project was an evolution of some earlier studies developed by Marshmallow Laser Feast seen in motion here.

At EYEO’s 2013 festival in Minneapolis Liam Young gave one of the closing kenote lectures. In a multimedia performance he takes the audience on a storytelling walking tour through the Brave New Now, an imaginary city, extrapolated from the wonders and possibilities of emerging biological and technological research. A place found somewhere between the real and the imagined, both achingly familiar and exceedingly strange, stitched together from fragments of distant landscapes and speculative designed fictions.

Darryl Chen from Tomorrows Thoughts Today presented an extended stream of consciousness on Productive Dystopia as part of Failed Architecture #10 Beyond Failure at Trouw Amsterdam. Also speaking on the evening were Ole Bouman (Shenzhen Biennale of Urbanism/Architecture), Matthias Bottger (raumtaktik), Arjen Oosterman (Volume) and Mark Studholme (Archello) moving beyond ruin porn and blind futurism to discuss the benefits of failure.

Sign Up Now! Applications close June 14th. Open to All.

Tomorrows Thoughts Today’s Liam Young’s co run studio the Unknown Fields Division is launching the call for applications for their 2013 summer expedition to Madagascar. The Unknown Fields Division is a nomadic design studio that ventures out on expeditions to the ends of the earth to explore peripheral landscapes, industrial ecologies and precarious wilderness. These 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. Each year they navigate a different trajectory as we seek to map the complex and contradictory realities of the present as a site of strange and extraordinary futures.

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. These were outlaws moored on a marooned ecosystem. Set adrift 88 million years ago, the island is a castaway in the Indian Ocean, inhabited by a band of ecological stowaways. In this splendid isolation it has evolved into an unparalleled wonderland of the weird and unique, diverse and unbelievable.

A political coup in 2009 left the country adrift once more – isolated from the international community, deprived of foreign aid and conservation funding. One of the planet’s most precious ecological treasures is home to one of its poorest nations and it raises difficult and complex questions about the relationship between necessity and luxury. Amidst political uncertainty, the island’s fragile and unique ecology is being smuggled out illegally, boat by boat, gem by gem. Rare tortoises leave in rucksacks, forests are carved into the ebony fingerboards on Gibson Guitars or $1million rosewood beds sold in China.

In the run up to the country’s first election since the coup Unknown Fields heads to Madagascar to catalogue the push and pull of economy and ecology and to trace the shadows of the world’s desires across the landscapes of this treasured island.  Along our way we seek to uncover some of the complex value negotiations that play out across this unique island and craft new stories from statistics, data, predictions, projections, measurements and offsets.

The Division will venture through wild west sapphire towns and mining landscapes and trek through rainforests ringing with the song of the Indri in search of rare and undiscovered treasures, a menagerie of preciousness and scarcity, of rubies, minerals and exotic spices, of ring tailed Lemurs, ‘octopus’ trees, and carnivorous plants; of pigmy chameleons, tomato frogs and moon moths. We will travel by plane and pirogue, train and taxi-brousse, from rough roads to rough seas, to fishing villages and up rivers silted with eroded soils. Unknown Fields will reimagine a territory that is equally wondrous and scarred as we follow the trail of global resource extraction into the heart of the most unique ecosystem on the planet.

Joining them on tour will be international collaborators from the worlds of technology, science and fiction, and together we will form a travelling circus of research visits, field reportage, rolling discussions and impromptu tutorials that will be chronicled in a publication and film developed en route.

Eligibility

The Unknown Fields summer expedition is open to all architects, designers, artists, writers and interested parties, students or professionals.  A portfolio or CV is not required, only the online application form and payment.

Applications

The deadline for applications is 14 June 2013. Application forms and additional information are available online at: www.aaschool.ac.uk/unknownfields and applications can be submitted to: visitingschool@aaschool.ac.uk or contact info@unknownfieldsdivision.com for questions. All participants travelling from abroad are responsible for securing any visa required. After payment of fees, the AA can provide a letter confirming participation in the workshop.

All inclusive Expedition fee: £1500, which includes flights from London, all internal transport, accommodation, entrance fees, meetings, consultants, workshops and all other group costs (excludes meals). Please note: If you are based closer to Madagascar you can meet Unknown Fields on location in Antananarivo and we can arrange a reduced fee that excludes return flights from London.

+ £60 Architectural Association Membership. If you are already a member of the AA, this is not required.

Like industrialization and mass production before it 3d printing has the ability to transform our world beyond recognition. But, with a backlash against the nascent technology already underway, it remains to be seen whether the future will be wondrous or dystopic. For ICON Magazine’s issue 118 on 3d Printing Liam Young has speculated on the consequences of this technology  from the scale of the cell to the scale of the planet. An extract of the article is below.

In September 2003 a single grain of sand was sucked up from the bottom of the ocean and shot out of the nozzle of a GPS controlled dredging barge. This particle changed state, from a nonspecific sand bar drifting endlessly with the currents of the Persian Gulf to the foundation layer of a terraformed island that would become a part of The World Dubai. It is a 3d printed artificial archipelago formed, grain by grain, into a scaled facsimile of the globe. The original world it is modelled after consists of such immense quantities of matter that make it possible to form an endless constellations of artefacts. The story of a particle of material laid down, accreting, aggregating, fusing and assembling is the story of these structures and their altered states. When we can print such structures, layer by layer, particle by particle we can reorder the world, from the very small to the very large.

The new world of 3d printing is not here yet. The hype however has already arrived. Some are swept up in what the new world could be, others are sceptical and look on with caution or disinterest. It is a technology upon which we project all our wonder and anxiety and the debates say more about ourselves than they do about the technology. In his state of the union address President Obama placed his hopes for new American jobs on 3d printing technology which “has the potential to revolutionize the way we make almost everything”. Vast repositories of TED talks present the same lampshades, customized shoes, iphone cases, Stradivarius violins, ball point pens, key rings and plastic models of the statue of David.

It is a technology in transition. It is a before the laws technology, developed without regulation, without big corporate, in the wilds of garage hack shops and maker fares and we still don’t really know what it will all mean. It is an impossible question to answer but it is just as seductive as it was when it was asked of the personal computer in 1977. The role of the PC was not understood until across time people found unexpected uses for it, like email, word processing video games and the internet. Architects once speculated on the impacts of industrialisation and then mass production. It is not until you push back against the systems of control that they reveal themselves. From the very small to the very large, from the banal to the fantastic, micrometre by micrometre we can remake the world.

Down the fibre are beamed bootleg files filled with glitches, 3d spam and junk mail. We awake in the morning to the whirring, buzzing sounds of our kitchen desktop printer spitting out late night porn ‘physible’s (Pirate Bay defines ‘physibles’ as data objects that are able and feasible to become physical), unwanted object ads and 3d pizza delivery flyers. Objects are laser scanned and printed, shared, scanned, printed, over and over and resolution slowly erodes, not from thousands of years of wind and rain but from minor imperfections, discrepancies and data decay multiplied with each cycle. They are fuzzy objects, slightly out of focus, like Chinese whispers, forever distanced from the original. Luxury is resolution. We find decadence in smoothness, delivered by expensive clean data and long, time consuming prints. The man who stands to make the most money from 3d printing is notorious patent troll and future master of the universe Nathan Myhrvold and his company Intellectual Ventures. They own the patent for a Digital Rights Management (DRM) system for 3d objects. 3d printing began with maker hobbyists but that may not prevent it from being co opted by a small number of very large entities. Walter Benjamin’s aura of the original may become nothing more than patent documentation or DRM protection. Just like Metallica’s Napster attacks we will see Zaha file claims against Shapeways for publishing pirate vases and counterfeit couches.

The house and in turn the city may be a dense mashup of google earth models and Grand Design house proud scanners. Fragments of a favourite window can be cut up, recomposed and reprinted in situ. We could grow an architecture superstar Chimera. Someone turns down the polygon count on a digital model of Zaha’s double curvature Guangzhou Opera House to give it a bit of the circa 1980’s faceted and angular Vitra Fire Station look. Her Wangjing Soho Towers already have a pirated clone in Chongqing that is outpacing the construction of the original.   Architourists will pilgrimage across the new world with their laser scanners to scavenge the point cloud of iconic structures and bring them back to an architectural salvage yard of millimetre perfect pieces of plastic history. Last season’s suburbs are melted down and reprinted as the city endlessly remakes itself in an accelerated history. Something between Kowloon Walled City and a Rio favela the 3d printed city is a seething reprogrammable urban mass of recontextualised fragments and geological material processes.

Huge expanses of landscape will be given over to recycle yards where material will be ground up and processed ready to be reprinted. Just as we smelted cutlery for the war effort, nothing is precious anymore and everything is a new object in waiting. Shape and form is just a temporary moment in the life of a material. The lifespan of any object shrinks to zero across a long enough timeline but in the 3d printed world this is an accelerated process of obsolescence and reclamation. We used to understand a product because it was made in specific place. It came from a site with the appropriate raw materials, a viable labour market or the necessary technology. In the new world the line between production and supply essentially disappears and anything can be made in everywhere.

We see accelerated geologies where GPS controlled landscape printers drift across the earth crafting in a morning what rivers and wind completed in a millennia. Laser scanned reproductions of iconic landscapes are terraformed in extreme resolution off the coast of Dubai. Boutique hotels and gated communities line the inside of their 1/3rd scale Grand Canyon. It is a theme park of synthetic copies, a reordered landscape at the scale of Google earth. Famous reefs are scanned and duplicated to reproduce perfect point break surf spots. Banzai Pipeline in Hawaii, Fiji’s Cloudbreak are printed along dead coastlines to spark tourist development and engineer resort growth. Like the planet engineers of Magrathea in the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy we will remake our own planet and then begin to print other worlds spinning off into orbit.

United States Patent Application 20100281850 is for a rocket that prints its own solid fuel. We can launch our assembly line into space to drift like satellites, always on call, printing the night sky. Hubble could have been fabricating multiple versions of itself. Programmed to reproduce, this hurtling fleet of fab labs could build our space stations in advance of our arrival. A moonbase, printed autonomously from the recomposed material of its own surface would lie in wait. From this vantage point we can see that the recombination of matter in micrometres can have consequences at the scale of the globe.

Like any technology 3d printing is open to misuse, exploitative regulations and tedious banality but it also holds the possibility of something wondrous, profound and unexpected. The future scenarios’ being debated are no more than evidence of the collective fears and anxieties, hopes and desires that we all carry with us through the everyday. It is a technology that is both exceedingly strange and achingly familiar. As we look down from this 3d printed satellite hurtling through space we can see a technology that is beginning to reorder our world but it us that are remaining the same.

All images by Daniel Dociu and developed for Under Tomorrows Sky

For VOLUME issue 35 Everything Under Control: Building with Biology scientist and broadcaster Adam Rutherford sat down with speculative architect LiamYoung in the basement recording studio of the journal Nature to discuss the mythical beasts of synthetic biology. Rutherford recently worked with the BBC on a series called ‘The Gene Code’ which explored the consequences of decoding the human genome. Recognizing the potential externalities of communicating science poorly, Rutherford works at conveying the misunderstood field of synthetic biology to a broader audience. Download the pdf here or read the pages below. 

From the Unknown Fields Division 11/12 Far North Alaska Studio run by TTT’s Liam Young and Kate Davies comes a new project by Will Gowland. The world is now concealed and manipulated in ways that make answering the question of where am I an impossibility. Glitches in the big and fragile infrastructures of Global Positioning systems mean we are sometimes both here and there, as a pulsing blue dot locates us to within 500metres. What are the implications of a navigational system based solely on the virtual? Will Gowland, in our Department of Landscape Glitches has jammed the GPS networks and revealed an alternative virtual topography, a territorial architecture of spoofed cartography. It is an emerging landscape that operates and exits in two parallel worlds, the physical and the virtual. Imaginary protest icebergs drift through the autonomously navigated oil shipping lanes. We get lost in a wilderness of illegal signal jamming formations and we glimpse the faint flicker of covert militarised GPS territories, super stable under a secret sky of black satellites. Some are landscapes of misdirection, others are navigational markers guiding one safely through unstable terrain. We now put our faith in a digital territory that is just as unknown and fallible as the physical.

Imaginary gps ghost protest icebergs drift through the autonomously navigated oil shipping lanes.

Oil reserves are hidden below digital GPS mountains

An illegal oil field is hidden in a GPS spoof, a digital landscapes of misdirection.

Tomorrows Thoughts Today’s Liam Young has been interviewed by We Made Money Not Art’s Regine Debatty for her ‘Artists in Laboratories’ radio programme on ResonanceFM. Each week Regine is in conversation with an artist, a hacker, a designer or a scientist discussing new art practices made possible by advances in science and technologies. Liam discusses his fictional city project Under Tomorrows Sky, the extreme landscapes of Unknown Field’s research expeditions and his upcoming Future Perfect exhibition at the Lisbon Architecture Trienal. You can listen to the interview here on sound cloud.

Liam has also been interviewed in Vienna by SpaceCuriosities’ Sandra Häuplik-Meusburger and Verena Holzgethan for Orange FM and the Cultural Broadcasting Archive. They discuss the value of the speculative project and the necessity for new forms of architectural culture to engage with the complexity of an anthropocentric world. Listen to the podcast here.

Darryl Chen’s New [Socialist] Village is a research project that asks whether China could teach the UK how to plan. It was exhibited at the 2012 Venice Biennale British Pavilion as part of the Venice Takeaway: Ideas to Change British Architecture research project; and at RIBA London from 26 February until 27 April.

Quoting Mao Zedong, imagining Ai Weiwei as an urban strategist, and citing Communist China as a model of flexible governance, the New [Socialist] Village proposes handing revolutionary power back to local people while co-opting the entrepreneurial skills of Richard Branson to create a model entrepreneurial village for the UK.

Hunch:
The Communist Party of China and the UK coalition government are aligned in their declaration to empower local people. Each has embarked upon an experiment to decentralise planning. At the heart of the N[S]V project is Caochangdi, a thriving diverse community where bottom-up opportunism meets top-down regulation. The village is, in government parlance, an atypical ‘new socialist village’ and an anomaly amongst the city’s singularly masterplanned mega-developments. Between the gaps of the government’s evolving planning laws, the village’s growth has been subversively driven by the survival instincts of local residents and the bohemian opportunism of artists. Between them, they have redefined what a village can be and look like.

Scenario:
A failing high street located on the fringe of the periphery of a UK city is a perfect location to trial an experiment in village-making. Empty council-owned car parks are divided into micro-plots and sold to individuals borrowing from Big Society Capital on the strength of their business plans. Obsolete shopping malls make way for a new wave of entrepreneurs who collectively redevelop sites with a multitude of small self-built structures. The village fosters the perfect conditions for entrepreneurial startups. A range of product innovators move in on the promise of being able to build freely and network among like-minded innovators. Business enterprises include value-added lifestyle products for the middle-incomes representing all stages of a family’s lifecycle from early to elderly years. The village creates a self-sustaining economy based on exports of value-added consumer products trading on its Britishness as a globally recognised brand.

UK project team: Darryl Chen, Nii An, Dean Walker, Luciana Martinez, Anna Gkiza, Atakan Guven, Yunlong Wang.

China project team: Ruishi Ge, Xiaoting Chen, Binwei Liu, Peichen Hao.

In collaboration with Hawkins\Brown.

Tomorrows Thoughts Today’s Liam Young is one of the curators of the 2013 Lisbon Architecture Triennale. Liam is developing the exhibition Future Perfect , a fictional future city that will open for visitors in September 2013. Future Perfect zooms into the fictional city developed for Under Tomorrow’s Sky and develops fragments of the future city at a 1:1 scale.

In a time of crisis architects need to be exploring big visions and bold gestures. It is not the time to retreat. The future must become a project again. Future Perfect brings together an ensemble of scientists, technologists, futurists, science fiction authors and designers to collectively develop the props, spaces, machines, cultures and narratives of their own brave new future city – an imaginary urbanism, the landscapes that surround it and the stories it contains.

Emerging in the shadows of the decaying towers of a post oil Dubai, Future Perfect is imagined as a new terraformed urban island. It is a city that is grown rather than built, a computed territory, faceted and abstracted, endlessly reprinting itself as demand requires. Buildings tessellate down the landscape as an inhabited geology of crevice rooms, and public valleys. Its material fabric has evolved as a complex endemic ecology where nature and technology intertwine and where biology becomes an economy. The city has developed in a near future heavily influenced by the imminent boom of the Indian subcontinent, an emerging technology and economic superpower- a hybrid culture, part Bollywood call center, part European cultural capital.  It is an imaginary landscape extrapolated from the wonders and possibilities of emerging biological and technological research.

In future Perfect project collaborations are forged between designers and technologists to develop a collection of commissioned works that can be inhabited as large scale fragments of the future city. Inhabit these moments of the from the future, sit within its pharmaceutical gardens, listen to the drone infrastructures drifting in the skies above, watch as the city endlessly remakes itself. These strategies bring the architect closer to the technologies that are increasingly shaping the urban realm and the public closer to the scientific research that is changing their world. The Future Perfect think tank includes Bruce Sterling, Warren Ellis, Rachel Armstrong, Daniel Dociu, Paul Duffield, ARC magazine, Centre For Science and Imagination, BLDGBLOG and many more. Artists and designers for Future Perfect will be announced shortly.

We are also accepting applications to be included in the other associated exhibitions of the 2013 Lisbon Architecture Triennale, Close, Closer. You can propose ideas for Crisis Buster Grants, Associated Projects, Student Prizes and a young architect Début Award - all details in the PDF attached! Check out our website for more details or download our launch booklet. You or your company can also be part of our project by becoming a friend, patron or benefactor. We are a non-profit organisation and hugely appreciate all and any support you may be able to give

From Chen’s essay “On Infrastructure”:

Infrastructure starts to outrun regulatory control. Police have no means of attending disputes over these miscellaneous grievances. The redesigning of nature blurs borders and redefines definitions of public amenity and urban rights. But as utility evolves, so does it become absorbed into our way of life. These geopolitical skirmishes and productive dystopias give birth to the future.

As part of an ongoing collaboration with Archis + Volume, Liam Young and the Unknown Fields Division have co authored VOLUME 31: Guilty Landscapes. VOLUME joined Unknown Fields on ther Summer 2011 expedition form the chernobyl Exclusion Zone to Baikonur Cosmodrome and this research, developed  alongside Unknown Fields previous missions to dislocated hinterlands around the world have informed the issues theme. Guilt has been effectively used to control and manipulate the masses. But it can also be the start of a change for the better: awareness, concern, action. Engagement and guilt are never far apart. Engagement is sublimated guilt. We can build on guilt, but can we build with guilt? Is guilt a material to design with? You can see the table of contents or check out a sneak preview of the issue.  

In three sections: revelations, confessions, and atonement, the issue presents a global scan of large-scale guilty landscapes and our design relation to them. A major section is dedicated to the Chernobyl ‘exclusion zone’ as a post nuclear disaster area, with other contributions focusing on landscapes transformed by mining industries, waste, human atrocities and more, as well as ways to atone for these criminal acts.

Under Tomorrows Sky is a fictional, future city. For MU Foundation in Eindhoven Speculative architect Liam Young of the London based Tomorrows Thoughts Today has assembled a think tank of scientists, technologists, futurists, illustrators and science fiction authors to collectively develop this imaginary place, the landscapes that surround it and the stories it contains. Working with special effects artists from such films as Alien, Sunshine and Blade Runner, the architects of Tomorrows Thoughts Today have built a room sized movie miniature model of the city.  Across the course of the exhibition invited guests will work with the city as a stage set to develop a collection of narratives, films and illustrations. Wander through this near future world and explore the possibilities and consequences of today’s emerging biological and technological research. The team includes Bruce Sterling, Warren Ellis, Rachel Armstrong, Daniel Dociu, Paul Duffield, Factory Fifteen, ARC magazine, Centre For Science and Imagination and many more. Follow the project website to see all the concept art imagery, the think tank discussions and photos of the exhibition.

Under Tomorrows Sky concept image by Factory Fifteen

‘KINGDOM COME’.  Central America 2012 – 13.0.0.0.0

Download Kingdom Come Studio Brief

The Unknown Fields Division is a nomadic design studio run by Liam Young of Tomorrows Thoughts Today and Kate Davies. The studio ventures out on biannual expeditions to the ends of the earth exploring unreal and forgotten landscapes, alien terrains, and obsolete ecologies. Far from the metropolis lie the dislocated hinterlands that support the mechanizations of urban life. A city like London is thoroughly embedded in a global network of landscapes and infrastructures that are typically forgotten, unseen, ignored or only presented through particular media narratives. Each year we navigate a different global cross section and seek to map the complex and contradictory realities of the present as a site of strange and extraordinary futures. For Unknown Fields the journey is really about seeing our familiar world differently; we explore these alternative worlds as a means to understand our own in new ways, either through physical expeditions or the design of speculative future projects.

This year as the world of new agers, mystics and psychonauts pilgrimage south, Unknown Fields journeys with them to Central America to ponder the rise and fall of cities, civilizations, and empires, both ancient and modern, and to investigate the cultural and technological infrastructures that underpin them – a network of complex systems that have proved critical to their prosperity and ultimately often implicated in their collapse.

Empires rise and fall and the infrastructural traces they leave behind are evidence of their greatest dreams and their deepest fears. They are the remains of a speculative future, the skeletal frames of world building dreams, the ruled lines on a page soon to be filled with the goings on of a day soon to come. In this time of crisis the future is becoming a project again. As the Mayan long count calendar begins a new phase we will imagine what comes next.

Coal miners once hammered rock with twittering canaries living beside them, their changing song a warning alarm for a dangerous gas leak. These living sensors watched over us and kept us safe.

‘Singing Sentinels’ by London-based architect Liam Young of Tomorrows Thoughts Today explores a future scenario where bio-engineered birds once again monitor the air for us. Eighty birds have been released into the New Order exhibition at the Mediamatic Gallery in Amsterdam as an ecological warning system, living in the space and providing audible feedback on the state of the atmosphere. Across the course of the exhibition Liam performed the climate change acceleration piece ‘Silent Spring’ seen in the film above. As a ‘pollution DJ’, he flooded the gallery with CO2, altereing the air mixture to replicated the predicted atmospheric changes of the next 100 years. We hear the canary song subtly shift, their rythmn change and eventually silence, as the birds sing a toxic sky- an elegy for a changing planet.

To accompany the exhibition Liam Young, Geoff Manuagh and Tim Maly have written a near future birdwatchers guide “A Field Guide to Singing Sentinels: A Birdwatchers Companion” with illustrations from comic illustrator Paul Duffield. You can see an excerpt and purchase your copy of the limited edition book online here.

See below for exhibition photos.

In the skies above the city a drone flock drifts into formation broadcasting their local file sharing network. Part nomadic infrastructure and part robotic swarm they form a pirate internet, an aerial napster, darting between the buildings….

Today we are much closer to our virtual community than we are to our real neighbours. This death of distance has created new forms of city based around ephemeral digital connections rather than physical geography. The infrastructure that drove the development of the city was once large permanent networks of roads, plumbing and park spaces but are now nomadic digital networks, orbiting GPS satellites and cloud computing connections.

Revolutionary communities are coalescing around social networks and text messages and occupy the city with the force to topple governments. The U.S. military’s has development autonomous aerial drones that they can be launched across a place like Egypt, when the government cut off internet access to prevent people from organizing protests. These drones would fly off and hover above the city, and create ad hoc connections and networks in a new form of nomadic territorial infrastructure.

Electronic Countermeasures is a project inspired by these new forms of nomadic infrastructure. The project explores the design and manufacture of a flock of interactive autonomous drones that form their own place specific, temporary, local, WIFI community- a pirate internet.
We have built a flock of GPS enabled quadcopter drones from components that were originally intended for aerial reconnaissance and police surveillance to create this flying pirate file sharing network. The drones are autonomous and drift above the public spaces of the city as a balletic interactive aerial choreography. Part nomadic infrastructure and part robotic swarm we have rebuilt and programmed the drones to broadcast their own local wifi network as a form of aerial Napster. They swarm into formation, broadcasting their pirate network, and then disperse, escaping detection, only to reform elsewhere.

The public can upload files, photos and share data with one another as the drones float above the significant public spaces of the city. The swarm becomes a pirate broadcast network, a mobile infrastructure that passers-by can interact with. It is a site specific file sharing hub, a temporary, emergent online community where content and information is exchanged across the drone network. When on location, a visitor can log onto the drone network with their phones and laptops. When the audience interacts with the drones they glow with vibrant colours, they break formation, they are called over and their flight pattern becomes more dramatic and expressive. Impromptu augmented communities form around the glowing flock. Their aerial dance and dynamic glowing formations give visual expression to the digital communities of the city.

By Liam Young of Tomorrows Thoughts Today

with
Eleanor Saitta
Oliviu Lugojan-Ghenciu
Superflux

Drone Pilots
Oliviu Lugojan-Ghenciu
Eleanor Saitta
Tobias Rosenstock

Project Team
Denis Vlieghe
Mond Qu
Dessi Lyutakova

Supported by
Mu Gallery, NL
GLOW Festival, NL
Buzzflye

Liam Young and Kate Davies, leaders of the Architectural Association’s award winning Unknown Fields Division, have announced a recruitment drive for their next public nomadic studio which will run from 20 Aug – 01 Sep 2012. You have until July to SIGN UP! Last year the division travelled on a cross section through landscapes of obsolete futures from the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, through the Ukraine and the oil fields of Azerbaijan to rocket launch pad of kazakhstan’s Baikonur Cosmodrone. This year go in search of Alien Encounters on a roadtrip from Mexican Border towns and the Roswell UFO crash site, through Area 51 to the Burning Man Festival.

Unknown Fields is a nomadic studio that throws open the doors of the AA and sets off on an annual expedition to the ends of the earth exploring unreal and forgotten landscapes, alien terrains and obsolete ecologies. Each year we navigate a different global cross-section and map the complex and contradictory realities of the present as a site of strange and extraordinary futures. You will be both visionaries and reporters, part documentarian and part science-fiction soothsayers as the otherworldly sites we encounter will afford us a distanced viewpoint from which to survey the consequences of emerging environmental and technological scenarios.

This year the Division will be heading off on a reconnaissance road trip to chronicle a series of extraterrestrial encounters from the borderlands, black sites, military outposts and folkloric landscapes of the United States. From the ‘illegal aliens’ of the New Mexico border towns we will head north exploring territories of negotiation and conflict, zones of transgression, suspicion and speculation. We will rumble along the UFO highway, past the mythic territories of Area 51, listening to tall tales from conspiracy theorists amidst the sonic booms crackling in the quiet desert air.

We will visit covert military test sites and the alien technologies of the aeronautics industry as we shape our own experimental craft to launch in the skies above the psychedelic community of the Burning Man Festival, where our journey ends. By the bonfires we will examine the mysteries and conspiracies that surround what lies off the map, off-grid and below the radar as we propose new truths and expose alternative fictions.

Joining us on our travels will be a troupe of collaborators from the worlds of technology, science and fiction including Geoff Manaugh [BLDGBLOG], Nicola Twilley [Edible Geography], futurist Stuart Candy and UFOologist, folklorist and author Mark Pilkington. Together we will form a travelling circus of research visits, field reportage, rolling discussions and impromptu tutorials that will be chronicled in an annual publication and travelling exhibition. Throughout our journey the Division will identify opportunities for tactical intervention and speculative invention as we examine the unknown fields between truth and fiction.

Enlist now before all the postiions are filled! Email l.young (at) tomorrowsthoughtstoday.com with any questions.

Tomorrow’s Thoughts Today’s Liam Young has been announced as the first recipient of San Francisco’s Headlands Art Centres ‘ new Architecture/Environment Artist in Residence award, supported in part by Seed Fund. Set in a refurbished Military base the residency focuses around ideas of the larger environment, sustainability, urban planning, architecture, land use and public space.

Liam’s residency will begin with a series of sorties through the surrounding landscape to survey the ecology and obsolete military technologies of the Marin Headlands. Large scale maps and drawings will form the basis for a series of small robotic installations and architectural prosthetics which will be installed on site as a new species of dynamic inhabitants, responding to the fluctuations and deviations of the surrounding landscape. Existing somewhere between biology and technology these delicate devices will imagine alternate strategies for intervening within natural systems. The residency will conclude with a series choreographed aerial robotic drone performances titled ‘Birds of Prey’ launched from the abandoned Nike missile silo sites. The residency will conclude in June with an intensive interdisciplinary design workshop and curated storytelling event in the surrounding woods.

Photography by Claus Langer

Tomorrows Thoughts Today will be premiering their new interactive installation Electronic Countermeasures live at the GLOW Festival Eindhoven NL every night 5th – 11th November. The performance schedule is 1800, 1830, 1900, 1930, 2000, 2030, 2100, 2130, 2200, 2230, 2300, 2330. See the map for where you can find us. The project is an aerial drone choreography developed in collaboration with Superflux and Eleanor Saitta and performed by drone pilots Oliviu Lugojan-Ghenciu and Eleanor Saitta.

Today we are much closer to our virtual community than we are to our real neighbours. This death of distance has created new forms of city based around ephemeral digital connections rather than physical geography. In this context the Electronic Countermeasures explores the design and manufacture of a flock of interactive autonomous drones that form their own place specific, local, wfi community and pirate file sharing network. Drifting slowly above the water of Eindhoven’s parks the fleet of modified quadrocopters perform a balletic aerial choreography as their soft glow reflects in the canal below.

The drones continue their luminous dance and dynamic glowing formations as they wait for a passer-by to interact with them. It drone can be contacted by calling the following numbers
drone 0 +31 648521583
drone 1 +31 648521578
drone 2 +31 648521581
drone 3 +31 648521591
As we signal the drones they break formation and are called over. Their bodies illuminate, they flicker and glow to indicate their activity. The swarm becomes a pirate broadcast network, a mobile infrastructure that passers-by can interact with. Impromptu augmented communities form around the glowing flock. As more people interact with the drones the more excited the flock becomes. They swoop dramatically across the surface of the water and they hover above the heads of all those with their mobile screens still activated. It is almost as if these glowing blimps are alive as they become mobile infrastructures with endearing behaviours. They are part city infrastructure and part technological creatures living amongst the trees.

The project is developed by Tomorrows Thoughts Today with Superflux and Eleanor Saitta
Production Team- Oliviu Lugojan-Ghenciu and Denis Vlieghe
Performed by Oliviu Lugojan-Ghenciu and Eleanor Saitta.

Photos by Claus Langer.

WONDER STORIES 3
Live in London and New York Oct 28th

Created by
Liam Young [Tomorrows Thoughts Today]
And Geoff Manaugh [BLDGBLOG]

In Association with the Architectural Association, Studio-X NYC, Popular Science

We have always regaled ourselves with speculative stories of a day yet to come. In these polemic visions we furnish the fictional spaces of tomorrow with objects and ideas that at the same time chronicle the contradictions, inconsistencies, flaws and frailties of the everyday. Slipping suggestively between the real and the imagined these narratives offer a distanced view from which to survey the consequences of various social, environmental and technological scenarios.

Wonder Stories chronicles such tales in a sci fi storytelling jam with musical interludes, live demonstrations and illustrious speakers from the fields of science, art and technology presenting their visions of the near future. Join our ensemble of mad scientists, literary astronauts, design mystics, graphic cowboys, mavericks, visionaries and luminaries for an evening of wondrous possibilities and dark cautionary tales.

For the first time, Wonder Stories will be simultaneously hosted in London and New York and Popular Science will join the Architectural Association and Studio X NYC in coordinating the event this year. Join us for the third event in the series as we chart a course from science fiction to science fact with talks, a hands on taxidermy workshop, animatronic guests, swarm robotics demonstrations, datascapes walking tour and live movie soundscapes.

Free to all. OCT 28 1200 – 2200 at the Architectural Association London and OCT 28/29 at Studio-X NYC

The event will be streamed live streamed here and you can follow the twitter feed with #tws3

LONDON EVENT

Hosted by
LIAM YOUNG (‘Tomorrows Thoughts Today’ and the AA’s ‘Unknown Fields Division’)
MATT JONES (‘BERG London’, Design technologists)

VINCENZO NATALI
Director of Splice, Cube, and forthcoming films based on J.G. Ballard’s High-Rise and Neuromancer by William Gibson

BRUCE STERLING
Scifi author and futurist

KEVIN SLAVIN
Game designer and spatial theorist

ANDY LOCKLEY
Academy Award-winning visual effects supervisor for Inception,compositing/2D supervisor for Batman Begins and Children of Men

PHILIP BEESLEY
Digital media artist and experimental architect

CHRISTIAN LORENZ SCHEURER
Concept artist and illustrator for video games and films such as The Matrix, Dark City, The Fifth Element, and Superman Returns

JULIAN BLEECKER
Designer, technologist, and researcher at the Near Future Laboratory

CHARLIE TUESDAY GATES
Taxidermy artist and sculptor, to lead a live taxidermy workshop

DR RODERICH GROSS AND THE ‘NATURAL ROBOTICS LAB’
Head of the Natural Robotics Lab at the University of Sheffield,to lead a live Swarm Robotics demonstration

GAVIN ROTHERY
Concept artist for Moon, directed by Duncan Jones

GUSTAV HOEGEN
Animatronics engineer for Hellboy, Clash of the Titans, and Ridley Scott’s forthcoming film Prometheus

SPOV
Motion graphics artists for Discovery Channel’s Future Weapons and Project Earth

ZELIG SOUND
Music, composition, and sound design for film and television

RADIOPHONIC
Throughout the day we will be accompanied by electronic tonalities from Radiophonic

NEW YORK EVENT

Hosted by
GEOFF MANAUGH (BLDGBLOG, STUDIO-X NYC)
NICOLA TWILLEY (EDIBLE GEOGRAPHY, STUDIO-X NYC)
POPULAR SCIENCE

BJARKE INGELS
Architect, WSJ Magazine 2011 architectural innovator of the year, and author of Yes Is More: An Archicomic on Architectural Evolution

NICHOLAS DE MONCHAUX
Architect and author of Spacesuit: Fashioning Apollo

HARI KUNZRU
Novelist and author of Gods Without Men and The Impressionist

JAMES FLEMING
Historian and author of Fixing The Sky: The Checkered History of Weather and Climate Control

ANDREW BLUM
Journalist and author of Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet

DAVID BENJAMIN
Architect and co-director of The Living

MARC KAUFMAN
Science writer and author of First Contact: Scientific Breakthroughs in the Hunt for Life Beyond Earth

DEBBIE CHACHRA
Researcher and educator in biological materials and engineering design

JACE CLAYTON AND LINDSAY CUFF OF NETTLE
Nettle’s latest album, El Resplandor, is a speculative soundtrack for an unmade remake of The Shining, set in a luxury hotel in Dubai

CHRIS WOEBKEN
Interaction designer

SETH FLETCHER
Science writer and author of Bottled Lightning: Superbatteries, Electric Cars, and the New Lithium Economy

SIMONE FERRACINA
Architect and author of Organs Everywhere

DAVE GRACER
Insect agriculturalist at Small Stock Foods

HOD LIPSON
Researcher in evolutionary robotics and the future of 3D printing

ANDREW HESSEL
Science writer and open-source biologist, focusing on bacterial genomics

CARLOS OLGUIN
Designer at Autodesk Research working on the intersection of bio-nanotechnology and 3D visualization

[Image credit 'Inception' dir. Christopher Nolan]

Liam Young is part of the Glitch Fiction exhibition for the inaugural Paris Design week. The exhibition is open daily from 11:00 – 19:00 12 – 18th Sept at Cite de la Mode et du Design, Docks en Seine, Qai de Austerlitz, Pars 13. If you can’t make it to Paris then you can download the Glitch-Fiction Newspaper to see a summary of the projects.

“Glitch Fiction is the false error, the point of chute, the wormhole in the timeline, the what could have been? At the edge between science fiction and reality, a series of thought-provoking, participative and speculative design projects will be revealed.

From 12th to 18th September, Glitch Fiction will land in Paris for the very first Paris Design Week. Visit us at la Cité de la Mode et du Design to witness a chaotic Black Swan unfold, to feel the spitting heat of ash hit your high-heels in your living room, to have a machine generate your fairytales, to get caught in a thunderstorm of fish, to see your eyes, lips and skin lost in the fragments of others, to explore a new techno-social landscape through your ears or to imagine scientific rituals not yet explored.

Come, test out and experience the fringe of design for yourself. Glitch Fiction mixes activist and experimental designs in a real office of wonders. Dreams, nightmares, near realities and hyper fantasies meet in the middle to explore the implications of current and emerging technologies through the presentation of fictional scenarios, parallel worlds, extrapolated tangents, cautionary tales and design fictions. Inspired by science and technology the following proposals use design as a medium to speculate, be critical and stimulate debate around our human relationship to science and technology in our current, alternative and imagined future everyday lives.

Also in the exhibition is Gunnar Green,  Bernd Hopfengaertner, Studio Good one, Xavier Poultney , Austin Houldsworth, David Benqué, Nicolas Myers, Nitipak Samsen, Ilona Gaynor, Zoe Papadopoulou, Nelly Ben Hayoun and Good Wives and Warriors

An exhibition coordinated and managed by Nelly Ben Hayoun Studio, Visual Design and website by Nicolas Myers and David Benque

Tomorrows Thoughts Today is part of the summer exhibition at MU Gallery in Eindhoven NL titled ‘The Great Babylon Circus’ and curated by the Berlin based critic and curator Lukas Feireiss, author of the book ‘Utopia Forever’ also featuring a number of TTT projects.  The exhibition brings together a group of artists and architects to engage in “the continuation of the never-ending design of the Tower of Babel. The Tower of Babel is one of the primordial metaphors of architecture, art and construction, as well as of the multiplication and confrontation of diverse languages and styles. The tower also symbolizes the ultimate hubris of human creation — the ambition to build something larger than life itself.”

In addition to Tomorrow’s Thoughts Today, participating artists are Brazilian social and cultural collective Project Morrinho, Belgium-German art collective Speedism and Moroccan artist Mounir Fatmi. The collaboration of these four global creative practices in the arena of MU unite around the mythic Tower of Babel theme, presenting us with new angles from which to view this legendary subject, and arguing for its social, political, and cultural relevance in today’s world.

Tomorrows Thoughts today (in collaboration with Denis Vlieghe and Oliviu Lugojan-Ghenciu) have installed an expansive living landscape of moss and robotics. Set within the vegation is a array and strange and curious creatures of the near future. Born of the city’s electronic surplus yet now essential to the city’s function, these species of beings have emerged who warm, warn, entertain, annoy, and play. They have arrived unannounced, emerged from the remains of rampant and uncontrolled modernisation, and have been subsumed into the normal workings of the city. In fact, the city itself has become a singular sentient being constructed of these malformed and (d)evolved freaks — the city’s new infrastructure.

Corporate research and development divisions scrutinize the beings, playing technological catch up with this autonomous evolution, the invisible hand of progress. Field researchers now observe the specimens captured in a controled environment. Gazing over this curated landscape, a robot zoo, the researchers’ working hypothesis is that the distinction between the products and byproducts of modernity have disappeared, and it is this disappearance that defines our new urban territories. In addition to the familiar favourites from our Specimens of Unnatural History project, collected within the zoo are such new specimens as:

The Virtual Forest
Observation notes: A landscape of artificial trees flicker with a distant wind. The augmented forest is wirelessly connected to a wind sensor in the Aokigahara forest at the foot of Mt Fuji. Thought to be haunted the remote presence of the winds rustling through the trees in Japan now illuminates a virtual ghost wilderness. Two simultaneous landscapes connected across the globe.

Networked Rodents
Observation notes: Existing animals are hacked to create a roving sensor network across the landscape. Like the old canaries in the coal mine birds sense and detect levels of toxicity in the air, grey squirrels track their own pest populations to extermination, moths and butterflies become a micro spy infrastructure and others monitor and scan for subtle ecological shifts.

Goldfish Avatar
Observation notes: Sensors track a lonely goldfish swimming in a tank. It becomes the live input for an emerging digital simulation. The fish’s movements are translated into an endlessly evolving online avatar that continues long after it is flushed away. Across time a virtual ecosystem takes shape on the web. Soon the internet becomes more of a wilderness than the disappearing landscapes of the physical world, a strange zoo of virtual ghosts.

The Digital shadow
Observation notes: Feeding off ambient electro magnetic fields of the cities neon lights and communications networks these floating antenna harvest the airborne energy to power a broadcast of white noise. Clouds of these blimps cast an electronic shadow across parts of the city. Initially an experiment in energy harvesting this infrastructure is now just gets up to general mischief but unexpectedly it also has creates some of the only disconnected analogue spaces in the city, where one can steal a brief moment of digital silence.

Monitor drone
Observation notes: Relentless and obsessive the tracking eye of the monitor drones scan ambient conditions and is sensitive to minute fluctuations in vast arrays of environmental data. Flocks laser scan the landscape recording animal numbers and vegetation patterns as point clouds of digital data. Wilderness sites become large curated landscapes constantly managed and engineered to create a perfect simulation of nature in balance.

Photograpghs by MU and Oliviu Lugojan-Ghenciu

“Our narrative is modernity, and our dystopias are the super-planned, re-planned and unplanned environments of the modern world. The aberrations and abandoned spaces of our modern environments, the margins that are squeezed by the excesses of development, the new natures that are produced in lieu of what was natural, the waste that is left behind after the flight of capital— these are the instable interstices of modern life. They are latent territories that are both the unforeseen consequences of our modern impulse, as well as the raw material for a renewed project on the city.
“Like a private detective covertly sorting through the trash of a client’s ex-lover, so we find in the wastelands of our modern existence a potent indicator of our cultural habits. These rogue byproducts of our modern existence even threaten to play an active role in the progress of our urbanism. There is in this deduction the possibility to recover something  from the ruins of the present in the formulation of the future….

“…An exploration of consequences  cannot escape from judgment or criticism. By its very nature it ought to be critical—that is, of our present society’s norms and forms. It is a game of persuasion where the power of speculation rests not on how it will solve problems but instead on how it will  capture our imagination, and by its ability to seed further exploration. Powerful architecture transcends the merely moral and embraces the sublime, the grotesque, the monstrous, and the radical.

“The present can be mined for those critical projects that turn the perverse, fantastic and  underrated phenomena of our modern world into design platforms. This vast material at our disposal can be projected into the future in order to let wild imaginings roam free  and  test speculations against our own fragile notions of what should be real. This activity is tangential to the spectrum of morality. It both provides a lens on the future and provides a critique of the present, and in so doing collapses future and present into the same time-frame unearthing tomorrow’s thoughts today.”

From the Data Archaeology Lab in the Architectural Association’s Unknown Fields Division 09/10 Arctic Circle studio run by TTT’s Liam Young and Kate Davies comes Data Fossils by Tobias Jewson. Tobias, with Ioana Iliesu have explored what happens to our collective history when everything is digital. In the digital era our information no longer takes the form of the physical, but that of a electronic file stored in ‘the cloud’. Our collective history is quickly effaced from this fragile and ephemeral domain, a computer crashes, formats are quickly obsolete, a hard drive is lost and all is gone. With our attachment to physical objects and mementos becoming increasingly superseded by our relationship to information, what will we leave for future generations?

The project employs design speculation as a critical tool to explore the potential ways in which architecture and landscape may respond to our ever evolving digital fascination. ‘Data Fossils’ has evolved as a series of fictional scenarios grounded in technically rigorous physical and computational investigations. Real techniques have been developed for encoding digital information in the physical world at both individual and collective scales.

Advances in biocomputing are allowing the possibility of storing data in living, physical forms. As the division between our bodies and the digital becomes increasingly blurred, the bone’s ability to remodel itself, in response to stress, can be hacked to provide data storage. Polyps of calcified binary code become written onto our skeleton, recounting our digital identities.

A teenage informational glutton comes for a surgery consult, his skin stretched with the growths of excessive music and porn downloads. His hoarded browser bookmarks cripple his every movement.

A poet’s finest sonnet is read like Braille through his skin, prostitutes steal the secrets of their bussness clients through gentle carresses of their naked body.

The treasured remains of a loved one becomes an archaeology of memories.

An illegal immigrant hacks and grafts fragments of data bone into his own body in an attempt to conceal his true identity. His airport xray scan reveals the extensive titanium grafts typical of data identity theft.

From the Data Archaeology Lab in the Architectural Association’s Unknown Fields Division 09/10 Arctic Circle studio run by TTT’s Liam Young and Kate Davies comes Data Fossils by Tobias Jewson. Tobias has evolved his data fossils experiments from the intimate and personal attachments that calcify on our own bones into a vast digital geology of an internet archive cast into layers of volcanic glass across Iceland’s deserts. In the digital era our information no longer takes the form of the physical, but that of a electronic file stored in ‘the cloud’. Our collective history is quickly effaced from this fragile and ephemeral domain, a computer crashes, formats are quickly obsolete, a hard drive is lost and all is gone. With our attachment to physical objects and mementos becoming increasingly superseded by our relationship to information, what will we leave for future generations?

Our collective history can be deposited in columns and strata of earth – where once archivists trawled the library stacks, data geologists now roam the Icelandic landscape. Like climate records trapped in ice cores data archiving can also become a geological process. In southern Iceland the division found a ravaged landscape of eroding lava deserts- a desolate crust hiding beneath it extraordinary geothermal resources that now support huge investments in an emerging national industry of data storage and server farms. Data Geologies rehabilitate this damaged landscape by co opting these investments in technology and reimaging the Icelandic typology of data archives.

A suite of new software applications that subvert existing digital prototyping machines to encode the ephemera of the digital world into ever evolving architectural landscapes. Hoards of machines traverse the lava deserts, scraping loose sand from the surface, and under immense heat transforming it into elaborate glass like geometries, within which our recent internet activities are encased. Programs are developed to encode data inputs into structural building elements.

Simulation software is developed for the realtime growth of data geology from live twitter streams.

Informational topographies grow based and cluster on keyword inputs. The drugs keyword feed is especially active from late evening to early morning.

Topsoil blown by the harsh arctic winds soon gathers in the lee side of these immense structures, the grounded geological layer sprouting grass and moss. Over time, habitats will grow in the glimmering hollows as fields of data slowly reverse Icelandic soil erosion. Local Islanders read the growth of this landscape from afar, whilst archaeologists look close ,using advanced MRI scanners, searching for insights into our past. Information enthusiasts scan google earth sattelite images, deciphering geographies of data from across the globe.

People pilgrimage to this area known to hold the last data relating to flurry of internet activity from the day Michael Jackson died. It becomes an informational cathedral, a spatial obituary grown from a real time data feed.

And while tourists might flock to see history in the making archaeologists will read the dull fragments of frozen silica as records of our digital pasts.

Liam Young and Kate Davies, leaders of the Architectural Association’s award winning Unknown Fields Division, have announced a recruitment drive for their new annual nomadic studio which will run from 11-22 July. You have until May 20th to SIGN UP! You can check all the costs and arrangements on this flyer and then you can sign up now to join them on an extraordinary design research expedition through the unknown fields that lie between nature and technology and collaborate with Volume magazine and Phillips Technologies on the production of an annual publication and touring exhibition. This first year takes them on a cross section through landscapes of obsolete futures from the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, through the Ukraine and the oil fields of Azerbaijan to rocket launch pad of kazakhstan’s Baikonur Cosmodrone.

THE UNKNOWN FIELDS DIVISION is a nomadic studio that sets off on an annual expedition to the ends of the earth exploring forgotten landscapes, alien terrains and obsolete ecologies. Each year we navigate a different global cross-section and map the complex and contradictory realities of the present as a site of strange and extraordinary futures. We are both visionaries and reporters as the sites we encounter will afford us a distanced viewpoint from which to survey the consequences of emerging environmental and technological scenarios.

This year, on the 50th anniversary of Yuri Gagarin’s first manned space flight, we will pack our Geiger counters and space Suits as we chart a course from the atomic to the cosmic to investigate the unknown fields between the exclusion zone of the Chernobyl Nuclear Reactor in the Ukraine and Gagarin’s launchpad at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. BBeginning in the shadows of nuclear disaster we will survey the irradiated wilderness and bear witness to a sobering apocalyptic vision. We will skirt the retreating tide of the Aral Sea and mine the ‘black gold’ in the Caspian oilfields and caviar factories. We will wander through the cotton fields of Kazakhstan and tread the ancient silk road before reaching the shores of the cosmic ocean bathed in the white light of satellites blasting into tomorrow’s sky. In these shifting fields of nature and artifice we will re-examine our preservationist and conservationist attitudes toward the natural world and document a cross-section through a haunting landscape of the ecologically fragile and the technologically obsolete.

Together we will form a travelling circus of research visits, field reportage, rolling discussions, and impromptu tutorials.  Across our journey The Unknown Fields Division will identify opportunities for tactical intervention and speculative invention that will be chronicled in an annual publication and travelling exhibition. It is a unique opportunity to be a part of an extraordinary research project that will examine the Unknown Fields between cultivation and nature and spin cautionary tales of a new kind of wilderness.

Enlist now before all the postiions are filled! Email l.young (at) tomorrowsthoughtstoday.com with any questions.

Eligibility

The workshop is open to anyone from anywhere. No pre requisites are necessary.

Applications

The deadline for applications is 01 June 2011. Application forms and additional information are available online here and more information can be found at:www.unknownfieldsdivision.com.   All participants are responsible for securing any visas required for entry to Ukraine, Russia and Kazakhstan and are advised to contact their home embassy early. After payment of fees, the AA School can provide a letter confirming participation in the workshop. Applicants are advised to contact the AA as soon as possible in order to apply and confirm a place, as space is limited. Places can only be reserved upon receipt of a completed application form and full fees, sent to Sandra Sanna, Administrative Coordinator of the AA Visiting School at visitingschool@aaschool.ac.uk

Schedule & Venue

The school runs from 11 to 22 July and will begin at our London rally point before travelling by land, sea and air on a landscape cross section from the Chernobyl Exclusion zone in the Ukraine to the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazaksthan. This is an immersive, travelling studio with a fixed itinerary requiring full-time participation. Workshops will be conducted en route at a series of unique venues conducted by an ensemble of collaborators who will be joining us on the expedition.

Accommodation & Costs

The AA Visiting School requires a fee of £650 per participant which includes a £50 Visiting Student Membership, made payable to the AA School of Architecture. As a unique travelling studio Unknown Fields has packaged all costs of our extensive travel itinerary including all flights from and returning to London, internal travel from Chernobyl to Baikonur, all accommodation, entrance fees, permits and workshops into one additional fee of £900. Participants need to bring their own laptops, camera equipment and working materials. Please ensure that all equipment you are bringing is covered by insurance. The AA School takes no responsibility for items lost or stolen whilst travelling to/from or attending the workshop.

More Information

Programme Directors: Liam Young and Kate Davies
Academic Coordinator AA Global School: Christopher Pierce:
Global and Visiting School Coordinator: Sandra Sanna

T          +44 20 7887 4014

E          visitingschool@aaschool.ac.uk

[image credit Baikonour- NASA/Bill Ingalls, Chernobyl- source unknown, Azerbaijan- Crude Awakening]

Scatterbrain Iceland is an architectural novella that proposes, through a narrative format, the construction of the Internet as an artefact, as a supercomputer server-farm. This is an excerpt:

“A crest of purple reflection wavered along the length of Songling’s bodysuit as her arm described the perfect parabola required to deliver the grenade to its target. As her hand attained the apogee of its circuit her front foot sunk into the spongy bundles of fibre-optics, which splayed under her shifting weight. Beneath her boots the crystal canopy quivered and flexed, and beneath that the halos of solid-state drives chimed like miniature bells in an informatic cathedral. The grenade now twisted along its arc, moving silently through the hibernal gloom across the fantastic billow of blue and red LEDs, across the floating sea of rhythmically pulsing information.

Fifty yards away the ventilation shutters of a server tower chattered and clicked, broadcasting thermal semaphore to electric storm clouds. A square hole in the curving basalt façade marked the liminal space leading to an open service hatch. As the grenade cleared the threshold of this short tunnel two yellow-suited figures appeared, Guardians of the Cloud. They each held a cordless neon tube powered by the immense electromagnetic field of the thousands of servers that filled the tower. The Guardian closest to the doorway also held a weapon, the barrel of which was already rising as he came into view. The vectors of these bodies – the grenade and the Guardian – shared an interstice both in time and space. Bouncing off the Guardian’s shoulder, the grenade would continue a new trajectory past the lift head, down the central column of the tower. It would pass eighty storeys of concentric server cores and detonate – immediately the ventilation shutters would snap closed, disrupting the chimney-effect that regulated the Web’s temperature. The immense heat generated by the computers would build up under the stack. Very soon the whole tower would combust, quickly setting fire to its neighbours.

But Songling would not live to see this. The fulcrum of the two bodies was precisely the same moment that the Guardian’s trigger-finger achieved critical pressure. The force of the bullet striking Songling’s shoulder caused her to turn as she fell, revealing a spinning panorama of towers, a landscape of computational infrastructure that extended out beyond the geothermal reactors to the limits of the valley. This was the New Internet, a machine that did much more than simply recollect the virtual lives of humanity. It inter-compared, analysed, synthesised, and generated abstractions. It constructed elaborate logical underpinnings and formulated its own languages to test the structure and consistency of our world. It had become an organism.

It produced idiosyncratically inconsistent and unpredictable opinions, like its creators. But what only Songling seemed to comprehend was that the Internet would not accept this grossly parasitic relationship with its parents for much longer.

For obvious reasons, the Web could not be allowed to survive.”

“Most technological breathroughs are met both with frenetic predictions of life-changing improvement, and fear and naysaying. Instead Geoff Manaugh, Tim Maly and Liam Young examine the myriad implications of future technological escalation by speculating about their consequences through believable (though fictional) examples ranging from chemical-sensitive fowl to transhuman support groups made possible by nanoengineering.” Volume. pg72. Issue 24 counter Cultures

This is one fragment from the work. See Volume no. 24 Counter Cultures for more from the Strange Natures of Nanotechnology.

A field guide to toxicity machines.
From The Macmillan Birder’s Guide to Britain v8.03.3453

Green-throated Coal-gull
Highlight: Sensitive to high levels of CO2 in the air.

Description: When in the presence of high levels of carbon dioxide, their plumage phase shifts to an extraordinary emerald color. Coal-gulls can be found in gathering around the remaining coal-burning power stations and carbon sequestration centers. Take a fire extinguisher with you to draw them out of the trees. Note that caution is necessary when calling and tracking these birds, as evidenced by the ongoing litigation against a BBC documentary team for frivolous chemical spraying.

Roseshift Starling
Highlight: Engineered to monitor atmospheric levels of nitrous oxide.

Description: Typically brown and forgettable at ground level, in the presence of the greenhouse gas nitrous oxide the Roseshift Starling displays a fanned tail of extraordinary incandescent plumage that reflects in the sunlight. These rare species are best spotted in gas cloud flocks at high altitudes or over recently fertilized farmland. If you do encounter one on the ground, however, emptying a nitrous canister nearby will initiate its vivid display. These can be acquired from custom car garages or contact us for our private list of birding dentists.
NB. The guide does not encourage nitrous use for anything other than bird watching. We do not support the ‘laughing birders’ organization.

Bomb Sparrow
Highlight: designed for explosives detection

Description: Originally developed to signal the location of explosives labs, Bomb Sparrows flock in elaborate formations marking the atmospheric presence of chemically dangerous concoctions. Typically very difficult to track down, their formations are dispersed very quickly by British intelligence; making clear sightings quite rare. Your best chances are in the outer suburbs or anonymous tower blocks. If you are lucky enough to see an actual detonation, Bomb Sparrow flocks are extraordinary. But be careful: mixing your own chemical lures may result in prosecution under the Prevention of Terrorism Act.

Trumpeter Finch
Highlight: Sings in the presence of concentrations of carbon monoxide.

Description: This species typically makes its nest along busy highways and main streets. Listen out for the high-pitched song of the Trumpeter Finch when airborne particulate levels reach toxicity thresholds. Go in an SUV convoy for the best chance—and pack a gas mask to hear their song up close.

Tomorrows Thoughts Today’s Liam Young and Liquid Factory’s Kate Davies have just launched the 10/11 Diploma 6 programme for their Unknown Fields Division studio at the Architectural Association. The studio outline is below.

‘Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.’ Arthur C. Clarke

This year the Unknown Fields Division continues to enter into new relations with the territories of science, nature and fiction. We explore the complex, rich and contradictory realities of the present as a site of strange and extraordinary futures and probe our preservationist and conservationist attitudes toward the natural world. In our  Galapagos Island studio we mused on evolution,  last year in the Arctic we contemplated the end of the world and now we look toward strange new beginnings as we embark on a voyage to bear witness to the reinvention of nature through technology in the Australian Never-Never. 

The Division will 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 vast techno-landscapes. This land of rich resources and sparsely inhabited expanses houses huge feats of engineering; technological incisions into the narrative landscape of the Dreamtime – the creation mythology of the indigenous Aboriginals. Stories and ceremonies of dreaming beings that once shaped the sacred sites of mountain ranges and river-beds are now spun with the ghosts of modern technologies. 

Here beneath the Southern Cross, telescopes listen to the beep-beep from alien worlds, solar arrays track the sun, observatories scan the Milky Way and all the while, machines harvest the earth for the precious ingredients of our daily lives. We will venture ‘out back’ into a hidden terrain – a strange landscape behind the scenes of modern living – visiting the vast mines of the interior, stalking mechanical beasts the size of buildings and exploring excavations the size of cities. Violent gestures of accelerated geology employed across these vast expanses create landscapes of erasure, excavation and re-articulation. Towering mountains of tailings, articulated valleys and vast lakes emerge from these incisions; re-made as new nature.  We will be both visionaries and reporters, critically engaged with the conditions of today through speculation about the coming of tomorrow. Clambering over the wreckage of the future, our architecture will operate in the no-man’s land between the cultivated and the natural: a new Dreaming for a new kind of wilderness.

Image credit: Space Project by Vincent Fournier

This is an exerpt of the travelogue from Acres Green. See slow thoughts for the Beamer Bees, Mobile Mountains and Prosthetic Trees and more from this strange little community.  By  Anab Jain + Jon Ardern of Superflux, Liam Young + Darryl Chen of Tomorrows Thoughts Today and Chris Hand and the ‘Power of 8’ team.

At first the residents didn’t know what to call them. The once strange creatures had no name. Maybe there was a manufacturing code, or an RFID tag attached surreptitiously to their underbelly, but nothing official or as obvious as a logo like on a newly unveiled car. No motor show. No fanfare. They just arrived.

Their size was striking. Not that they were big, but that they were unsettlingly human in dimension, each specimen the equivalent mass of an adult man inflated into a rotund figure. Each displayed a great folded surface like unfurled wings spread into a complete and airtight enclosure. Manufactured with precision pleats and jointing expertly executed, the pristine body constituted an object equal to a small exploratory spacecraft or even a fine tailored suit. Its form had a quality of otherworldly beauty, but in recent years those once virgin husks were now marked with the deposits of airborne nuisances – carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxides, platanus acerfolia pollens and pigeon shit

A homage to the fog catchers that came and went before them, these sophisticated beings were appendages to the natural environment – microclimatic machines. Fastidious in their task of redistributing water, they were able to green small pockets of the ecosystem with workaholic obsession. Their great canopied bodies expanded to collect moisture and contracted to move more efficiently. Hovering the skies, they sought out humid air systems following low air pressure systems, collecting moisture on their outer skins and collecting them in their fuselage. They then deposited this rain – I suppose you could call it rain – on farmlands outside of cities. A promised land like an old testament morality tale.

The ‘new clouds’ – for that’s how they came to be known – were semi-autonomous in their seeking out of moist air. Their sensors allowed them to surf the waves of air streams and navigate atmospheric shifts with a precision only matched by their animalistic beauty. Innately responsive to this atmospheric realm by design, it was later discovered that they were also acutely sensitive to ultrasonic frequencies.

A DIY loving community had another outlet for their obsessive research. Arrays of tweeters and other sonic devices provided an improvised control terminal from which the clouds could be directed. Suitable facilities were able to be quickly assembled for such purposes. And they provided an interface with human society that served to remind the airborne beings of their difficult relationship with their creator race. Guiding the clouds manually with all of the paraphernalia of control was a difficult task. Like the docking of a ship on choppy waters, guiding the cloud to its destination was a particularly imprecise art. As residents expanded an ever-multiplying assemblage of hardware, their efforts became steadily more adept at steering the dextrous beasts. But the technologies remained the same mid-tech of: oscilloscopes, palm-sized controllers, and banks upon banks of tweeters.

And so, these mobile radio stations played the soundtrack to a silent dance party. 

The clouds were coerced into a hasty transition to the city. Like trafficked contraband they were quickly seized upon by a bevy of ham radio enthusiasts and electronics hobbyists who were able to commandeer the clouds by intercepting them on their normal travels and intervening in the regular service of this mobile infrastructure. The law remained a grey area for would-be hackers. The utilities company who had invested in the technology had once made public threats to those interfering in their operations, but so common were the infringements and so inconsequential were they to their normal water harvesting operations that the authorities turned an ambivalent glance away. This was at once evidence of the stone cold profitability of the clouds, and a tacit approval of an avenue of potential mayhem.

Rooftops became venue of an urban-scaled game of one-upmanship. Normally the clouds traced a path of natural forces making visible the currents of warm air and humidity in the lower atmosphere. Now interrupted, the clouds became an extension of the collective competitiveness and entertainment of the geek classes.

From street level the clouds were a spectacle as they dipped, dived and passed by each other in combat-like aerials.  Duels of aerial tag ensued where fuselages narrowly missed each other and sudden changes of direction imitated a kind of drug-fuelled mating dance. The ham radio operators would often gaze into the sky wildly while others reached into their bags of tricks (mostly pre-hacked components and electronic discards) desperately modifying hardware to boost their signal.

The aerial escapades were an almost primal celebration where the near exasperation of extraordinarily simple technologies played out against the backdrop of the city. All the while, the obediently harvested water dripped away as those clouds jerked from side to side in pursuit of each other. Puddles formed in streets, windows were suddenly splashed, and renegade mists rendered the skyline an erratic decomposition in water.

Denizens of the village had become accustomed to sudden changes in weather. The clouds brought rain in the dry seasons and interfered in all manner of other ways with air movements and atmospheric visibility. It was as though the village had changed into a totally different urban environment – one that looked the same but with a spasmodic climate. Sometimes the coming changes in weather could only be read by seeing the shimmering profile of the clouds above our heads, marked ambiguously against the ‘real’ sky. But this required the residents to be looking, and to be honest, they had all learned to go about their business as normal.

Not everyone was so ambivalent. Some alternative movements protested against the intrusion into their previous way of experiencing climate. They rallied their defences shielding against the onslaught of the clouds in literal and symbolic ways. Such radicals were seen hoisting umbrellas and waving flaming torches about their heads, igniting the flammable hydrogen of the clouds in protest. They celebrated the kind of rain their village used to have, insisting on its health benefits as they danced open-mouthed with faces turned to the sky. And the rest of the village realized how similar they were to those very clouds themselves – trying to cope within the changing conditions of our world. Both clouds and frustrated observers were objectified as oddities, and yet subsumed into our daily life, our blase experience of the city, this urbanism of designed weather.

The Imaginarium is an exhibition co-curated by Tomorrow’s Thoughts Today and Studio Lukas Feireiss (editor of Beyond Architecture, Spacecraft and Architecture of Change etc) with Luis Berrios-Negron.  The exhibition brings together a group of architects, artists and scientists including TTT’s Liam Young, Francois Roche/R&Sie(n), Greg Lynn, Philip Beesley, Rachel Armstrong, Theo Jansen, Terunobu Fujimori, Triptyque Architecture, Ilkka Halso, Lucy McRae, Cero9, Mas Yendo, and many more to engage the prescient subject of ecological change and adaptations caused by artificial interventions into existing ecosystems.

‘The Imaginarium’ is curated as an unnatural history museum of archaeological fragments,
 botanical samples, exhibits, evidence and curiosities. 
Archived in the accompanying Catalogue of Speculative Specimens we see a jump in the fossil record, an evolutionary leap, as the interbreeding of biology and technology has given birth to a strange new nature. The Imaginarium forms part of the exhibition Examples to Follow: Expeditions in Aesthetics and Sustainability curated by Adrienne Gohler. and is open from 3.09.10 – 10.10.10 at the Uferhallen in Berlin. See more photos and videos below.

All images by Roman Goebel and Liam Young.

From the 9-17 July Liam Young will be coordinating a design studio for the Architectural Association visiting summer school in Madrid with Ricardo de Ostos principal of Naja & de Ostos and Tobias Klien of Horhizon. Shadowy forces have conspired to put together this axis of evil teaching lineup drawn from the most twisted and kinky studios the AA has to offer.  It will be a rock n roll 10 day intensive design studio including lectures, workshops and prototyping. Places are still available and you can sign up here.

The studio theme will be ‘Bleaching Green’ which will explore the relation between architecture and energy use in dense cities in the near future. The Bleaching Green workshop will venture into uncharted territories blending design intuition and technological invention. By casting a critical eye on current sustainability and environmental strategies, the course objective is to investigate architecture as a hybrid of artificial and natural systems.

Tomorrow’s Thoughts Today is part of Superfront gallery’s group show “Unplanned”. If you can’t make it to LA, the catalogue can be ordered online, which also features essays by Geoff Manaugh (BldgBlog), David Turnbull (GSAPP), MitchMcEwen (Superfront), Ines Moreira (Petit Cabanon) and Cristina Goberna Pesudo (Fake Industries Architectural Agonism). Writes Pesudo: “…it is in the lack of consensus where this exhibition succeeds the most, where perverse imaginaries create a field for disensus apart from institutionalized points of view…”

Exhibition runs until 2 July 2010.

Pacific Design Center # 208

8687 Melrose Avenue | West Hollywood, CA | 90069

This is the second installent of a series of projects to come out of our Power of 8 research trip to ‘Acres Green: The Way Life Should Be’.

…the hypnotic dance patterns of small, glowing insects against the warm colours of the dark sky left us in awe, and we wanted to know more. We stopped two people dressed in large netted clothing walking down the street. They introduced themselves as ‘hivers’ and told us the story behind these mysterious creatures:

These glowing creatures were the Beamer Bees or Beamer Signum Apis Melifera, formulated by a community of biologists and hired bio-hackers to service under-pollinated trees, plants and vegetables due to the disappearance of honey bees.

The Beamer Bees are guided by radiowaves and electromagnetic landscapes to crops requiring pollination. They are produced in a limited number each year, and their interactions with the bumble bees and other creatures are tightly monitored. It seems that the Acres Green residents can buy licenses to call the bees. License holders use the bugles or other personal mobile devices which transmits radiowaves that the bees can detect. The bees follow the waves to their source.

We realised how the Beamer Bees had became central to the Acres Green ecosystem and people seemed to be able to live in harmony with them. We see a glimpse of one family’s everyday interactions with the new creatures. Practical, yet stylish netted fashion ensured comfort on the way to a party, Gardeners who missed out on licenses opportunistically used wifi routers to attract bees to their plants.

Discovering unexpected cross-pollinated flowers became a new hobby, their daughter was allowed to keep a glowing bee as a bedside pet.

The Beamer honey syrup and royal jelly, with its unique medicinal qualities is prescribed by GPs for allergies. 

The first installment of an ongoing project.  Chapter 1: the electric aurora.

In the preface to his 1957 bestiary ‘The Book of Imaginary Beings’ Jorge Luis Borges describes a child’s first visit to the zoo. With wonder and joy the child marvels at the strangeness and mysteries of the unfamiliar creatures that they have never before seen. This encounter with a zoo of the real sits within the catalogue of a zoo of mythology, inhabited by ‘necessary monsters’ which are imbued with the dreams and fears of those who conjured them.

Today our idealistic views of the natural world are becoming outmoded. We are beginning to encounter a new form of nature that seems born of the scientists of myth and allegory. The augmented body, genetic modification and neo biological invention is now confronting us with the
utterly novel reality of engineered ‘monsters’. This project engages with this call to redefine the very nature of nature by exploring the potential of monstrous myths and fictions as critical tools with which to engage with emerging environmental conditions and the evolving perception of nature in contemporary culture.

These questions are developed through “Specimens of Unnatural History”, a contemporary recasting of the bestiaries of the past As a zoological voyeur it explores the savannas of body modification, anime, taxidermy and biotechnology to gaze out across the near future population of this augmented wilderness.

This first instalment is an electric aurora. Thousands of these creatures swarm like locusts through the night sky, glowing within illuminated clouds.

These monsters form critical instruments through which to view the potential of a transformed nature, perverted by the hybridization of culture and technology.

Darting to the safety of the shadows a biotech ferret munches on its prey…

The fourth installment of an ongoing project.  Chapter 4: the Bioluminescent Billboard, the Roving Forests and an Augmented Ferret.Carefully we watch our step as annoying bioluminescent billboards scamper about the pavement looking to catch someones attention…

The liquid twitter of nesting birds rings, parched leaves crackle and young trees trudge achingly feeling for the right weather. The warming sun trickles through the canopy of this migrating forest as it chases climate change across the globe in the morning light of a day yet to come.

See ‘The Electric Aurora’ in the previous Post for a further description of the concepts behind the project.

I am pleased to announced that Wen Ying Teh and her project from the Menagerie studio at the AA ‘Necessary Monsters’ run by Liam Young and Kate Davies has been awarded the RIBA 2009 Bronze Medal. The studio have trawled the wilds of genetic modification, augmented bodies and neo biological invention to query today’s idealistic and preservationist views of the natural world. For three weeks we voyaged south, following Darwin’s expedition to the Galapagos Islands and South America. We discovered a precious and fragile wilderness teetering at the point of collapse, an ecology in crisis, bearing the scars of a ravenous tourist economy. Projects were developed in this context as critical tools to instigate debate and raise questions about architectural practice in relation to the social and political consequences of various environmental and technological futures.  Read below for an exert of the project or explore it in full on the RIBA website.

An existing salt mine sits as a scar on the Galapagos Landscape. Once the natural habitat of Flamingos, this salt lake has long been a desolate space ravaged by the nearby restaurant industry. The Galapagos is caught between its massive contribution to the Ecuadorian economy and its value as a historic wilderness.

This project is conceived of as a provocation and speculation on how these two demands may be hybridized as an alternative to the typical conservationist practices applied across the islands. The two traditionally mutually exclusive programs of salt farming and Flamingo habitat are re imagined as a new form of symbiotic designed ecology; a pink wonderland, built from colored bacteria and salt crystallization, dissolving and reshaping itself with seasonal and evaporative cycles. The building becomes an ecosystem in itself, completely embedded in the context that surrounds it.

Formed from fine webs of nylon fibers held in an aluminum frame, this strange string instrument allows the salt farming process to be drawn up out of the lake, returning it to the endemic flamingos whilst at the same time ensuring the continuation of a vital local industry. Using just capillary action, salt water from the lake crystallizes on the tension strings forming glistening, translucent enclosures. It encrusts the infrastructure of a flamingo observation hide and solidifies into a harvestable field ready to be scraped clean by miners.

The project has been developed through scale models that were used as host structures for an in depth series of crystallization experiments. Material erosion, spatial qualities, structurally capacity and evaporative cycles were all determined through physical testing. The architecture and its physical models grew slowly across time, emerging from the salt waters they were immersed in, to become fully developed crystalline structures.

The Galapagos is an ecology in crisis. The project is positioned as part documentary, part science fiction offering both a rigorous technical study and a speculative near future wilderness. An evolving future for the islands is imagined and it demands an evolved and mutated architecture.

DIY Urbanism makes a debut in this quarter’s Urban Design magazine – the voice of many an embattled professional urban designer and sourcebook for shared surface roads, character-based place-making and high quality inclusive public realm (among other para-governmental best practice design guidance).

The journal devotes its regular Viewpoint pages to the “cheeky? incisive?” TTT project which is otherwise featured on this site as “How to be a successful urban designer” (scroll down for that post in this column).

The more people involved in the regeneration planning process, the more it seems to require very smart people to negotiate that process for an engaging and innovative urbanism. There’s a breed of urban designers who are struggling within a bureaucratic, risk-averse and stultifyingly political design environment – and it comes to light in any issue of the UDG journal.

But that’s no excuse for pattern-book common-denominator trite that passes for urban design – and DIY Urban Design’s main targets are those organisations that have a made a buck out of banal formulaic masterplans. Follow the 10 steps and you too can be an urban designer!

So what? That’s life, right? Well, here are two slightly random offerings that spring to mind and that might offer a way beyond.

Foucault turned his latter-day attention towards the elusive idea of the heterotopia, suggesting a more compelling urbanism was taking places outside of the control of a deliberate design agenda. Ok, so he didn’t really finish his speculations, but he implies a mode of enquiry that could constitute a fresh take on UK regeneration practice. Lesson 1: Value the obscure!

Thom Mayne has been expounding a kind of auto-generative design – part enjoying the messiness of the architectural process, part celebrating crazy and unexpected spatial experiences. He accepts the mediation of his design impulse by the forces surrounding his commission and ends up with works he is proud of, even as he eschews knowledge of them! Lesson 2: Enjoy the unexpected!
Want more ideas? The Slow Thoughts column will be filling up with more projects and slowly gestating work from the minds of Tomorrow’s Thoughts Today.

And remember: Think twice before drawing a perimeter block!

More of my urban design ranting here.

Darryl Chen (Tomorrow’s Thoughts Today) and Elena Pascolo (Urban Projects Bureau) have just launched a unit in the Bartlett’s MArch Urban Design programme. Riffing on Colin Fournier’s overall course brief of Urban Fiction, we’ll be exploring the dark side of urbanism via a rigged Spanish Inquisition-like investigation of the spatial type. Download here, or read on….

Horse+Pig, Speedism

TOO MUCH OF A GOOD THING

We find strangeness in the city all around us. Often the strangest and most flawed cities are the most compelling. From crime-riddled New York of the 70s, class-segregated Rio de Janeiro, hyperdense Hong Kong, and the synthetically artificial Tokyo, all are conditions of excess – often excesses of things that were good to begin with, but have become corrupted. Yet something about these cities makes them perversely attractive. Is it here we glimpse the true essence of urbanity? While we want to act upon the city with good intentions, there is no avoiding its byproducts, ruins, and failures.

In this unit, we will be exploring what happens when our desire gets the better of us, what happens when you have too much of a good thing. We will be exploring the urban type as the seed of disaster. Your urban fiction will be overlaid onto a future Los Angeles or London to turn it into a city of extreme dysfunction, a city on the road to ruin, a theatre of the grotesque, where an imbalance in the urban ecoolgy leads to dystopia.

But don’t worry if you’re not the pessimistic type. After first taking a bitterly pessimistic view of the world, right at the brink of total meltdown, we will then attempt to recover a productive outcome and even a new society. It would make for a killer plot twist.

Term 1: Your Own Personal Dystopia

1    The Protagonist
You will identify strange moments within the form of the city that offer powerful consequences – good or bad – for an urban future. Your intuition will lead you to a place you shouldn’t go, but is still strangely compelling. Often a DYS-topia is simply a U-topia gone wrong – and it only takes one fatal flaw to descend an idealistic vision into chaos. You will use work undertaken in the first three projects – LA/London comparison; Patchwork City and Recombinant Urbanism – as source material for a prolonged and focussed spatial analysis. From those projects you will identifiy one fundamental piece of the city that you want to take forward in investigation, and distill as a prime example of a distinct spatial type.

A spatial type is an unstable element that forms a fundamental building block for the city. Neither good nor bad, it offers the potential for a spectrum of urban effects depending on how it is configured and recombined. In this first term, you will suspend your do-gooder impulse and unleash your dark side.

Oil Rocks, Caspian Sea

2    Character Development
You will subject your specimen to a series of diagnostic tests. Laid on the operating table, you will seek to understand the specific peculiarities of your chosen type – to understand the forces that underpin its growth, what makes it so compelling, and the variables that will modify it. How far (wrong) could it go to defining a new world?

Political, economic and social factors are always evident in urban spatial configurations, and it is through various means of instrumental drawing that we can uncover these hidden truths. Over the remaining six weeks of Term 1 you will produce three extraordinary drawings that will form the perfect groundwork for your Term 2 propositions. You will draw the Plan, the Fragment and the Panorama. Detailed briefs and workshops for each of these will be issued separately in the following weeks. These exercises will first cause you to look at a part of the city in detail, before zooming out to explore its consequences at an urban scale.

Nafta Land, Richie Gelles

3    The Scenario
Your drawings will have led you to an intimate understanding of your spatial type, but also to a series of questions about its limits, its variabilities and its incongruencies. Not only have you analysed its functionality, but you have let its dysfunctions run wild and explored its potential for creating a glorious new dystopia. Your endgame will be a scenario where its dysfunctions have reached a breaking point. An imbalance of cosmic proportions.

Your folio will primarily comprise these three exquisite drawings that together describe your own personal dystopia within social, political and economic contexts. Think about presenting these as a captioned storyboard to sell to a movie studio boss. This is your scene setter. An urban fiction of a dystopian future. Is this the end? No, there’s a sequel!

Term 2: Urban Friction

Your investigations will have laid the setting for an encounter with a mutated future. Your detailed design project will be part of this continuum as you imagine a response to the dysfunctional world you created in Term 1. Your dystopia is a door through which you glimpse a strange new urbanism. One where the characters of the past move and dance in intriguing formations. Where the rubble of your spatial type has been reconfigured to gain its functionality, but now in ways you could never have expected at the outset of your journey.

Your diagrams and drawings from Term 1 provide a springboard into investigating this new world where friction – the rubbing together of different parts – is welcomed and nourished as a necessary condition of vitality.

We will now ground your work in a detailed urban design proposition (sited in LA or London) that strategically addresses the concerns of your first term’s dystopia. It will leverage the diagrammatic analysis of your spatial type to give a springboard to your critical imagination.

And the city lives happily ever after.

This year’s edition of Liam Young’s and Kate Davie’s Intermediate 7 design studio at the Architectural Association has just launched. Read on for this year’s agenda and watch this space as last years ‘Necesary Monsters’ studio projects will be posted shortly.

The end of The World and Other Bedtime Stories

‘The End of the Universe is very popular’, said Zaphod… ‘People like to dress up for it… Gives it a sense of occasion.’ – Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

We stare out through Hubble at the light from the creation of the universe. At CERN we hurl electrons at each other looking for clues to its beginning only to set in motion our collective anxieties about our demise in black-hole oblivion. We sit in wait for the end of the world. We have always regaled ourselves with unnerving tales of a day yet to come. Tomorrow is a dark place and our culture is full of tales of a natural world out of control. Whether it be nuclear apocalypse, viral epidemic, tumbling asteroids or eco catastrophe our anxieties about our future demise chronicle the flaws and frailties of the everyday.

This year Inter 7 continues to slip suggestively between the real and the imagined, in the space where architecture enters into new relations with the territories of science and fiction. It is an experience of the present as a site of strange and extraordinary futures. Last year in the living wunderkammer of the Galapagos Islands, we explored the origin of the species and breathed life into a menagerie of architectural monsters. This year we will once again investigate our preservationist and conservationist attitudes toward the natural world but this time we embark on a voyage to bear witness to the alien landscapes of technology. We have mused on evolution and now we will flirt with extinction.

We will set forth on a psychedelic road trip, a last chance saloon tour of sites at their point of collapse. We will clamber over the wreckage of the future to visit a no-man’s land between cultivation and nature and spin a cautionary tale of a new kind of wilderness. Here the radio crackles, skies darken, the weather warms, grey goo seeps from between the cracks, mutant crops roam free – it’s a beautiful day in the strange landscapes that lie behind the scenes of modern living.

Our projects may be militant solutions or last gasp redemptions; a call to arms or a head in the sand; swan songs, manifestos or glorious celebrations in the shadow of an imminent end. We will be both visionaries and reporters, part documentary and part science fiction, we will critically engage with the conditions of today through speculation about the coming of tomorrow. Standing at the brink we will contemplate an end that is laden with fears and inconsistencies yet at the same time proves to be ripe with unknown escapes and wondrous possibilities.

“The collapse of the stellar universe will occur– like creation– in grandiose splendor.” – Blaise Pascal

PROGRAMME

1. THE DOOMSDAY CULT.
Road trippers of the Apocalypse

We are looking for followers to join us in this world after the crash; to dance in the shadow of catastrophe and question our fears and misgivings about the future. The site for the first term will be our own bodies and a tricked out, hotted up psychedelic mobile home. As a unit will be forming a doomsday cult, we will throw open the doors of the AA, leave the school behind as we travel cross country preaching the word. We will open up the architectural practise to include the instigation of debate and the raising of questions about the social and political consequences of various environmental and technological futures. We will not go quietly into the night but in our bus we will forge an intentional community, activist architectures, eco terrorist responses and maverick manifestos.

1A. Taxonomy of fears.
To begin we will document and research headlines and news reports, websites and radio broadcasts referring to fears for the future and construct a multimedia exhibition in our cult studio. It will be a travelling circus, an overwhelming assault on the senses, exploring our relationship to these messages of apocalyptic doom and the way in which they filter into the everyday ordinariness of our daily lives.

1B. Props and Paraphernalia
For the major term 1 project we will breathe life into the characters and actions of our cult. We will furnish our cult home with all the belongings no cultist could be without. Across the term we will design and make Uniforms, Weaponary, Survival wear, Propoganda, forged newspaper articles, blogs, websites, street posters, megaphones, rituals, performances, treasured belongings and artefacts salvaged from the future. They will be props for films and documentaries we will make, they will instigate direct architectural actions and they will keep you warm on our field trip through the artic.  The cults fictional constructions will be moulded entirely from the raw stuff of reality, your work will be superfictions,  blending seamlessly with the real. Passers by and the rest of London will be unable to discern what is real and what is your project.

2.FAREWELL WORLD!
A Journey to the end of the earth

We will voyage to the edge of the world, ‘the last wilderness’, We will head into the darkness of an eternal polar night. Dogs will pull us across a constantly shifting landscape of ice and water , a land of mirages , sun halos and towering icebergs. We will listen for the call of the wolverines, stalk the caribou and Arctic hare. We will pilgrimage to visit the glaciers for the last time before they melt, we will track the last of the polar bears, we will shed a tear under the electric sky of the aurora. An inhospitable place, at the precipice of the issues of today; a loaded landscape,  to some the iconic register of global warming,   to some romantic vision of a long lost wilderness, to some a wasteland rich in natural resources. Beneath the sleepy snowdrift it is a highly political and fiercely contested territory.  We will embrace the aching beauty and sinister undercurrent of the Arctic. We will tip our hats and farewell the world as we know it before heading home to imagine what comes next.

3. THE CULT COMPOUND
A village for the dammed

Your final projects will be a constellation of architectural proposals for the Doomsday Collective. The props, paraphernalia and new mythologies developed across the year will condense as the architectural fragments of our Cult compound. We will not impose typologies or prescribe programmes but your projects will be born from your own ambitions, dreams, fears and obsessions.

You will be both visionaries and reporters, part documentary and part science fiction, we will critically engage with the conditions of today through speculation about the coming of tomorrow. Our speculative projects will offer a distanced view from which to survey the consequences of various social, environmental and technological scenarios. Your projects will present alternative architectures as test sites for the deployment of wondrous possibilities or dark cautionary tales.

Standing at the brink we will contemplate an end that is laden with fears and inconsistencies yet at the same time proves to be ripe with unknown escapes and extraordinary possibilities.

‘Everything is becoming science fiction. From the margins of an almost invisible literature has sprung the intact reality of the 20th century.’
 J G Ballard

Another spinoff from the Thrilling Wonder Stories gig we co curated is this futurist menage e trois organised with Icon Magazine between TWS contributors architect Francois Roche, blogger Geoff Manaugh and graphic novelist Warren Ellis. It was edited and transcribed by Icon’s Justin McGuirk and William Wiles and is published in their september issue. Also check out the same issue for William Wiles review of Roche’s kinky new project ‘I’m Lost in Paris’. Read the full conversation after the jump.