“It was in Orkney, those Scottish islands closer to the Arctic and to Norway, than to London, where I lay down on the sandstone beach, closed my eyes and dreamed. There I lay, on the remnants of Lake Orcadie, an ancient sedimentary basin that was warm with water four hundred million years ago. There, I could be. There, I could see. There, past and future could be equally rich with the fossils of possibility. This book holds something of what I saw, Dreaming on Lake Orcadie…”
–Laura Watts
About the Artist
Laura Watts is a writer, artist, poet, and ethnographer of futures at the IT University of Copenhagen. Her work is concerned with the effect of landscape and writing on how the future is imagined and made in everyday practice. How might the future be made differently in different places, and through different writing methods? How is the future imagined and made differently at the edge? She has collaborated with the mobile telecoms industry, the public transport sector, and most recently with the people and places around marine energy in Orkney, Scotland. She is co-author of the artisan book, Data Stories, a collection of ethnographic stories around Big Data, developed with Dawn Nafus, Intel Labs. Along with poet, Alec Finlay, she co-authored Ebban an’ Flowan, the world’s first poetic primer to marine renewable energy. More on her website…