An amazing/creepy visualization of what life might be like when we are “jacked in” to a virtual overlay 24/7. Lots of great little details in the animation. Note the sea of advertising that can be controlled, paying you more money per second depending on your environmental saturation.

The future looks AWESOME!

Augmented (hyper)Reality: Domestic Robocop from Keiichi Matsuda on Vimeo.

The latter half of the 20th century saw the built environment merged with media space, and architecture taking on new roles related to branding, image and consumerism. Augmented reality may recontextualise the functions of consumerism and architecture, and change in the way in which we operate within it.

A film produced for my final year Masters in Architecture, part of a larger project about the social and architectural consequences of new media and augmented reality.

A great article about Timothy Leary includes this bit of a conversation between Leary and media/society scholar Marshall McLuhan:

In one of their prophetic conversations McLuhan made the following prediction: ‘You’re going to win the war, Timothy. Eventually. But you’re going to lose some major battles on the way. You’re not going to overthrow the Protestant Ethic in a couple of years. This culture knows how to sell fear and pain. Drugs that accelerate the brain won’t be accepted until the population is geared to computers. You’re ahead of your time. They’ll attempt to destroy your credibility.’ Leary replied with typical Irish blarney: ‘It’s incredibility I’m after’, declaring himself a true futurist once and for all.

Leary’s Wikipedia page is excellent, too.

Following up on my post below (“What Is Fire?”):

“The only way to be happy is for everyone to be made equal. So, we must burn the books, Montag – all the books.”

It’s Francois Truffaut’s only film in English: Fahrenheit 451.

Chris Hedges nails it:

The tyranny we impose on others we finally impose on ourselves.

A human being is part of the whole, called by us ‘universe,’ a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separate from the rest – a kind of optical delusion of consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.

— Albert Einstein

A beautiful infographic by Bryan Christie Design graces the the IEEE Spectrum special report, Why Mars? Why Now?:

…it was in the stomach of this baby albatross. Photographer Chris Jordan explains:

The nesting babies are fed bellies-full of plastic by their parents, who soar out over the vast polluted ocean collecting what looks to them like food to bring back to their young. On this diet of human trash, every year tens of thousands of albatross chicks die on Midway from starvation, toxicity, and choking.

He and a team of creative folks are documenting what they find in the Midway Atoll and posting their work on a blog. It’s devastating.

James Kunstler posts his architectural Eyesore of the Month. The gem above is his April, 2009 entry, from Johannesburg, South Africa.

Since 1993, The Deoxyribonucleic Hyperdimension has been bringing you esoteric and visionary knowledge (and a lot of other crap, too). That tradition continues with their recent posting of a six-part interview with Peter Lamborn Wilson, better known in some circles as Hakim Bey.

Keep your eye on South America, folks, particularly Venezuela and Colombia. Colombia is ruled by the rightist government of Álvaro Uribe, and is engaged in a long-standing battle against leftist rebels known as the FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia). In addition to being a center of cocaine production and trafficking, Colombia has one of the worst human rights records in the hemisphere. Not coincidentally, Colombia is also by far the largest recipient of US military aid in the Western Hemisphere.

This week, the New York Times ran an article by Andrean bureau chief Simon Romero that opened with this lede:

Despite repeated denials by President Hugo Chávez, Venezuelan officials have continued to assist commanders of Colombia’s largest rebel group, helping them arrange weapons deals in Venezuela and even obtain identity cards to move with ease on Venezuelan soil, according to computer material captured from the rebels in recent months and under review by Western intelligence agencies.

Once again, we see America’s leading “newspaper of record” simply recycling the anonymous propaganda being disseminated by “Western intelligence agencies.” All of the information in the article is based upon materials which the Times’s anonymous intelligence source claims were found on computers seized by Colombian troops during a raid on a FARC compound in Ecuador in 2008. The article states, “The New York Times obtained a copy of the computer material from an intelligence agency that is analyzing it.”

Simon Romero has a well-documented history of running anti-Chávez/anti-Leftist stories that range from the merely misleading to the outright false. As a mouthpiece for the oligarchies of Latin America, Romero is indispensable.

Romero’s employer, by the way, is the same New York Times which published an editorial on April 18, 2002 supporting the previous day’s coup d’etat against the Venezuelan president:

With yesterday’s resignation of President Hugo Chávez, Venezuelan democracy is no longer threatened by a would-be dictator. Mr. Chávez, a ruinous demagogue, stepped down after the military intervened and handed power to a respected business leader, Pedro Carmona.

[...]

Washington has a strong stake in Venezuela’s recovery. Caracas now provides 15 percent of American oil imports, and with sounder policies could provide more. A stable, democratic Venezuela could help anchor a troubled region where Colombia faces expanded guerrilla warfare, Peru is seeing a rebirth of terrorism and Argentina struggles with a devastating economic crisis.

Yes, the military ousted the elected leader of Venezuela, and the Times’s editorial board welcomed the “resignation” of President Chávez. Nice. I’m sure they’ve improved since then, though!

Just yesterday, AFP reported on concerns being raised by officials in Brazil, Ecuador, Chile, and Venezuela about Colombian plans to allow US access to seven of its nation’s military facilities:

US President Barack Obama’s national security advisor said Tuesday Washington will give a “good explanation” for plans to deploy US military units to bases in Colombia, after unease expressed in Latin America.

When you see the US government pouring billions of dollars in military aid into a country, you can be sure nothing good will come of it.

Keep an eye on the Venezuela-Colombia border – that’s where Obama will get a war he can truly call his own.