In his short animation Augmented (Hyper)Reality, Keiichi Matsuda's offers a glimpse of an alternate universe, with augmented reality cranked up to the next level. But what to think of these kind of slick animations that provide us with either utopian or dystopian visions of our technofuture?
Matsuda is currently studying at London's Bartlett School of Architecture as part of the Unit 15 group, where students use animation and motion graphics to investigate new architectural possibilities. He writes on his Vimeo page:
"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. [This is] 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."
Visualisations of possible futures – like Matsuda’s – have always been popular, but when the tools of visualizing become more and more advanced, the speculative seems to become more real: without visualization, no reality. It makes me wonder how we will look back at this movie in 5, 10 or 20 years. Hopefully it will be proven as outdated as this beautiful piece of Retro Future.
EDITOR’S WARNING: Many people think on our Next Nature project is about the ‘future’. We have to disappoint them: it is not (at least, not really). The aim of our project is to re-investigate our relation with Nature. Next Nature is not something that exists in the future only; it exists today and – although we did not perceive it as such – it already existed in the past. We believe the best way to anticipate the future is to understand the present.
More at keiichimatsuda.com
Thanks Simona Kikurovska
Koert van Mensvoort
@Arnoud: You are right that there isn't yet a specific tag we use for augmented reality and the informatization of our environment, which is certainly relevant from a next nature perspective – while in the past our world used to consist of 'things' it increasingly consists of 'information'. Existing tags like 'symbolic-overdrive', 'boomeranged-metaphors', 'virtual for real' cover specific parts of the subject, but it might be worth to introduce a separate tag or theme. Put it on the agenda for our next brainstorm. Suggestions welcome.
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Arnoud van den Heuvel
This video reminds me of Bruce Sterling's SPIME / The internet of things. Do we have this subject covered already? Don't think so.
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