Liam Young

We live in an age of lists, from magazine features to online clickbait. This book situates the list in a long tradition, asking key questions about the list as a cultural and communicative form. What, Liam Cole Young asks, can this seemingly innocuous form tell us about historical and contemporary media environments and logistical networks? Connecting German theories of cultural techniques to Anglo-American approaches that address similar issues, List Cultures makes a major contribution to debates about New Materialism and the post-human turn.

Becky Summerfield is a lonely girl who loves writing stories and lives with her father in Warlock Grove, a small quiet town in the heart of the English countryside. She dreams of adventure and wonder, wishing to escape from her mundane life. So one day when she goes to the woods to write, little does she know what awaits her and how it will change her life forever. She meets the eccentric and enigmatic William Fireshine. A man from another world. Becky is then suddenly plunged into a terrifying world of aliens and creatures beyond even her imagination. William and Becky must journey across the universe to find the legendary Stone of Fate before a vengeful sorcerer can gain it's almighty power and it's a quest that will change their lives forever.

For Snowing in the Supercomputer Unknown Fields locate the environmental forecasts and data landscapes of the city and travel to Alaska's far north, to visit a territory that sits in the collective imagination as one of the last remaining wildernesses. Unknown Fields spend the winter solstice with climate scientists from around the world who are camped out in the most northern cities on the planet to collect data that is fed into the climate-modelling supercomputers and environmental policies further south. Traditional data visualisations and guilt-laden headlines may no longer be sufficient strategies to encourage the cultural shift now required. In this book Unknown Fields peers inside the supercomputer to find a set of surreal landscapes that sit between tradition and technology, the real and the imagined, the present and the future. They are landscapes given new narratives by native Alaskan authors and generated from the climate data and modelling software of supercomputer scientists. Against these images run panoramas of the supercomputer infrastructure that simulates them and the doomsday statistics that are shouted at us everyday, but that we do our best to ignore.

We live in an age of lists, from magazine features to online clickbait. This book situates the list in a long tradition, asking key questions about the list as a cultural and communicative form. What, Liam Cole Young asks, can this seemingly innocuous form tell us about historical and contemporary media environments and logistical networks? Connecting German theories of cultural techniques to Anglo-American approaches that address similar issues, List Cultures makes a major contribution to debates about New Materialism and the post-human turn.

In Treasured Island Unknown Fields travels through Madagascar to catalogue the push and pull of economy and ecology and meet the illegal traders of the world's luxury brands. 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. This book unravels the contemporary black market supply chain that strings the precious gem stones from the wild west mining towns of Madagascar to the celebrity necklines and trembling newlywed fingers of the city. One of the planet's most precious ecological treasures is home to one of its poorest nations and in the shadows of the world's desires we uncover some of the complex value negotiations that play out across this unique island.

In Never Never Lands Unknown Fields chronicle the creation stories of the city and 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 immense techno-landscapes. Here, in the Never Never, are the resource territories of the city, a land of rich geology, endless horizons and mining pits so large that they generate their own weather systems. For this book, Unknown Fields travel 1km beneath the surface of the earth to find gold and to survey and laser-scan the technological incisions that release it from the ground. These massive excavations are cut through the narrative landscape of the Dreamtime, the creation mythology of the Aboriginal Australians. Stories from two indigenous authors act as our Dreamtime guide as we drift across the grounds of traditional creation, before diving deep to follow a new subterranean songline, one created from underground mine computer models and laser survey data. Roughly 0.034 grams of this landscape is locked away in each of our mobile phones, charged and quietly vibrating. We all carry a little piece of Australia in our pockets.

To chart the black sites of the Unknown Fields city the studio commandeers an old US school bus and heads off on a reconnaissance trip through the borderlands of military outposts and the crater-pocked, fenced-off folkloric landscapes of the United States. The militarised landscapes which defend the city are hidden behind barbed wire, within inhospitable terrain or beneath the low resolution distortions of doctored satellite images and beyond their physical might, they are sites of psychological warfare, where rumour begins. High Strange is a graphic novel developed together with embedded comic artist Kristian Donaldson in response to the material Unknown Fields collected along this journey. It is a portrait of a landscape as a factory of fictions. A form of weaponised folklore. A territory that can be only understood by examining the stories the world tells about it.