Unintended Beauty

There is nothing in machinery, there is nothing in embankments and railways and iron bridges and engineering devices to oblige them to be ugly. Ugliness is the measure of imperfection. - HG Wells Unintended Beauty is an exploration of the accidental aesthetics of industry and science by photographer Alastair Philip Wiper. The exhibition explores a range of contemporary scientific and manufacturing sites, spanning from facilities tied to material production like Adidas shoe factories, to the particle beams colliding at the core of the ATLAS detector at CERN, and extending to food processing facilities like the slaughterhouses of the Danish Crown company. The images offer a rare insight into workplaces that are usually kept behind closed doors and reveal these infrastructures' hidden beauty and incredible complexity. Machines that smash atoms together, make fabrics or stuff sausages all result from human collaborative imagination and tell us about who we are: our needs, desires, madness and our vision of the future. The sustainability of this future depends on our ability to create and innovate. The exponential creativity associated with cutting-edge technology strongly contribut