Oscilloscope Laboratories? Nitrous canisters? Liquid LSD in a breath mint bottle?

Why does this new Beastie Boys short film seem strangely familiar…?

Another cool AR simulation from Keiichi Matsuda: Augmented City 3D. Lots of cool motion tracking.

More on his site here.

via io9

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.

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.