Hasta La Ideas

As the yellow XR-21 Bluebird school bus traverses across the desert terrain slowly reaching our final destination at Black Rock City in Nevada I catch up as best I can with my fellow passengers. A multidisciplinary group of international research students, architects and writers including a comic illustrator, a futurist and an animator chosen by the talented leaders of our extraordinary mission, Liam Young and Kate Davies of the Unknown Fields Division.

Serving as a platform for speculative inquiry, Liam and Kate along with fellow architect, Merlin Eayrs, curate their journeys as a cross-disciplinary practice seeking to experience first-hand the complex and contradictory nature of changing climates and emerging infrastructural landscapes. Often working with diverse practitioners alongside students from the Architectural Association, UFD will catalogue and document their experiences as a framework to create new narratives and construct potential new futures exploring alternative realities and cultures these extraordinary landscapes may afford.

On journey’s such as this summer’s road trip from Roswell to Burning Man, participants are each given a mission packet containing information on the aims of the trip, and most importantly how and what to prepare for.

This event in particular chronicled:

A series of extraterrestrial encounters from the borderlands, black sites, military outposts and folkloric landscapes, 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.

The Unknown Fields Division Itinerary

One such collaborator on this trip is Mark O. Pilkington, author of Mirage Men, and a key influence to the Unknown Fields Division itinerary which took the group to covert military test sites, the alien technologies of the aeronautics industry and the experimental communities and towns found across the Great West. Beginning their road trip at the Roswell Crash Site and the VLA (Very Large Array) in New Mexico, Mark was able to share his fascinating Mirage Men account of his previous travels around Nevada and the history of “UFOria and its origins in the murky worlds of espionage, psychological warfare and advanced military technology.”

Their journey into disinformation, paranoia and military technologies continued across New Mexico and Arizona with visits to the white sands missile range to explore the Hollowman Airforce base, home to the United States’ drone program, the Virgin Galactic Spaceport and the Titan Missile silo.

From top: White Sands Missile Range, Virgin Galactic Spaceport, Very Large Array and Titan Missile Silo. Photos courtesy of Anouk Ahlborn

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