AK6 Unknown Fields Division

I have just happily arrived back to Alaska to keep working away on my latest project Markers of Time in the dim short light of winter. This time around I am traveling for 12 days as a guest collaborator with a group of nine graduate students out of the architecture school at AA in London with fellow Headlands Center for the Arts 2011 resident Liam Young and his teaching partner Kate Davies. As a collaborator on their latest Unknown Fields Division graduate nomadic studio 'Strange Times: Far North Alaska' I will be leading some workshops, working with these fine students to help them develop their range of fascinating projects and they in turn will be assisting me with my work.

(photo into the night from my flight north)

Day one adventures included a visit to a world famous taxidermist, tour of the arctic studies exhibition of the Alaska native collection at the Anchorage Museum and a presentation by Charles Wohlforth author of 'The Whale and the Super Computer' (a great book that explores differing Inupiaq and science based perspectives on climate change). The day ended in a search for infrared camera gear for some graduate projects at a massive hunting store (after about half an hour I have to admit I started to freak out a little. A lot of camo. A lot of weaponry. A lot of decoys... the kid section and baby bottle with camo on it kind of took me over the edge).

Tomorrow we are off into the wilds all geared up... more soon.

In the mean time here is a description of the program:

Strange Times 0 - 180 Longitude. Far North Alaska

"I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center."Kurt Vonnegut

Far from the metropolis lie the dislocated hinterlands and remote wildernesses that support the mechanizations of modern living. Diploma 6 - the ‘Unknown Fields Division’ - probes the fertile territory between nature, technology and culture to explore our contemporary condition through critical acts of speculation. We map the complex and contradictory realities of the present as a site of strange and extraordinary futures.

The Division is a nomadic design studio embarking on expeditions to explore these unreal and forgotten places, techno-landscapes, alien terrains and obsolete ecologies. The otherworldly sites we encounter afford us a distanced viewpoint from which to survey the consequences of emerging environmental and technological scenarios.

Last year we speculated on the reinvention of nature and spun aboriginal creation myths with the modern mining technologies of the Australian ‘Never-Never’. This year we continue to slip suggestively between tradition and science as we voyage to the edge of today, through the strange times of far north Alaska.

As Winter Solstice approaches we will head into the darkness of an eternal night. We will dance along the Date-Line, our paths illuminated by twin electric skies, as we spend neon afternoons in the city and bask under the flickering Aurora in the wilds of the frozen tundra. We will stalk the arctic fox, marvel at the vast military outposts scanning the frontier and listen for the roar of ice road truckers snaking along the oil lifeline stretching south.

It is a cyclical landscape of natural and artificial time. Alaskan Inuits, informed by ancestral memories of their environments and its patterns, embrace the uncertainties of the future with a deep belief in their own adaptability. Meanwhile, environmental scientists attempt to assemble their observations into climate models in order to predict the future as precisely as possible. Caught between improvisation and premeditation these cultural relationships to landscape and time will define the future of the North and in turn our cities beyond.

Here in the darkness we will be explorers in time, deploying time-based media. Film, animation, storytelling, gaming and choreographic drawings will define dynamic spaces of motion and commotion, cycles and shifts, ebbs and flows. We will draw on the rich uncertainty of this territory, speculating on possible futures, rewriting histories and altering the present. Joining us in the division will be fellow time travellers from the worlds of technology, science and fiction and together we will examine the Unknown Fields between cultivation and nature and spin cautionary tales of a new kind of wilderness.

"The future is not google-able."

William Gibson