Unintended Beauty

Unintended Beauty is an exploration of the accidental aesthetics of industry and science by photographer Alastair Philip Wiper.

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

The project 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 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 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 contributes to our well-being and, at the same time, represents a threat to life on Earth. These aesthetically fascinating photographs give insight into the heart of the design process and question our production methods and the scale of that production.