Spanning 40 years of gameplay and 40 different games, this new volume dives into the design and history of dozens of virtual realities, acting as a travel guide to imaginative places that only exist in cyberspace.

Game developer and writer Konstantinos Dimopoulos’s upcoming book is called Virtual Cities: An Atlas & Exploration of Video Game Cities and features classic virtual environments from Fallout to Silent Hill, including some that overlap in uncanny ways with reality (like New Vegas). Maps and illustrations will accompany commentary from the author, who has a PhD in urban planning and geography and designs spaces for games, making him well-suited to explore the layouts of these places.

“Video games allow us to construct and visit believable imaginary cities, provide us with glimpses of ancient urbanism, and let us immerse ourselves in the wildest utopias and darkest dystopias of our possible futures. They are an unprecedented canvas for experimenting with the urban environment, and an utterly unique medium for experiencing cities both imagined and real in truly immersive ways.”

“I would describe game urbanism as a relatively new and truly intriguing area that allows for exciting research possibilities,” says the author. “Convincingly abstracting an actual urban setting into something both economical and believable can be very taxing.” But it has its rewards, too. “Tackling a truly exotic virtual city set in, say, outer space and inhabited by a variety of species, or attempting to imagine a fantasy town in an intricately crafted Tolkien-esque world can be immensely satisfying.”

The places have to be believable, following internally consistent rules that resonate with reality, while also being fantastical to experience. “A city can helps amplify a game’s atmosphere with its dark narrow streets and tall eerie buildings in a horror offering, provide with unique routes and good hiding spots in a stealth game, or even be used as a huge canvas for environmental storytelling.”

In a game with deserts, people will build places to shelter and get water, he recalls of one project. “The dev team went on and satisfied this almost mundane set of needs by having fresh water flowing over the roofs of the settlement in a network of connected, tiled pools and open canals that made sure all the digital denizens of the place lived in cooled buildings, and could easily access water,” Dimopoulos explains. In the end, each challenge is different, which is what keeps players coming back, too, when the cities within games are convincingly cool. The book, meanwhile, aims to unpack everything from the design process to user experience, and may hold lessons for real-life urban planners as well.

Standing nearly 40 feet tall, this giant arcing whale is composed entirely of plastic waste gathered from the Pacific and Atlantic oceans, carefully assembled in a canal of Bruges, Belgium.

Following a Liquid City theme, Brooklyn designers from STUDIOKCA chose the form to help observes visualize the magnitude and shape of both what winds up clogging the world’s oceans and the creatures impacted.

The net effect is striking, the arched water mammal rising up from the deep in a graceful curve, which, upon closer inspection, is made up of white and blue refuse, stamped with languages and brands from around the world.

Dubbed Skyscraper, the sculpture brings together 4,000 square feet of discarded plastic gathered in Hawaii beach cleanups, a small fraction of the 150 million tons currently lost at sea.

And while the majestic sea creature ricing from the canal might seem large, “pound for pound that is more plastic waste swimming in the ocean than there is whales,” say the creators. “So an opportunity like this to show the type of plastic and the amount of plastic that ends up in our oceans is really important.”

Abstracting views of the city, this huge installation uses computer algorithms to deform local everyday footage on a massive 14-by-23-foot display canvas.

Ordinary wall art can get old, especially when one passes it every day. In this case, hours of film can become thousands of unique compositions, slowly deconstructed into impressionist-worthy pieces on the screen.

ESI Design developed this trippy solution for the lobby of 515 North State Street in Chicago, a structure design by Pritzker Prize–winning Japanese architect Kenzo Tange built back in the 1990s.

As a contextual work,  it features shots of the Chicago River, city trains and waterfront amusements, all devolving dynamically. The designers created the logic and intent, but don’t actually shape the outcomes — this is done programmatically.

“Custom software analyzes each video for moving objects, so moments like a person walking, or a car driving become the ‘brushstrokes’ that slowly create each abstraction. As each video collides with the next, new compositions unfold in real time, literally creating thousands of possibilities.”

Meanwhile, the “display itself uses LED modules that are covered with a layer of vinyl diffusion, removing the harsh digital glare of bare diodes and giving the imagery a soft material quality instead. The entire display is framed with a painted metal molding, with the intention of referencing traditional canvas paintings.” Except even more so than paintings in galleries, each experience of this work is one-of-a-kind.

People often play a small part in architectural photography and renderings – not so in this series of travel photographs, which would lovely but otherwise unremarkable without clever human inclusions.

Anna Devis and Daniel Rueda are a design-minded couple, one an illustrator and the other an architect. And they have taken their creative sensibilities on the road, filling in the implicit gaps in built environments across Europe.

The settings represent a range of architectural styles, often bold yet minimalist except for that added element of interactivity, sometimes using props or costumes to turn facades into theatrical sets.

In Denmark, Spain, Italy and other countries they visit, Devis and Rueda take that old idea of a person seeming to ‘tip’ the Leaning Tower of Pisa to new heights. Pixelated surface suddenly become other things, like clocks or canvasses, apparently manipulated by the duo.

That critical personal element that animates each scene also serves as a foil for showing off the patterns and colors of each context, subverting but also highlighting design details. In some cases, added manipulations warp their surroundings as well. For more on their work, follow the pair’s journeys via their Instagram accounts.

In strikingly well-composed, vividly colored scenes resembling abstract paintings, J. Henry Fair’s aerial photographs of toxic waste and industrial activity on Earth give us an uncomfortable look at the cost of human progress. In fact, the images seem unreal: how could the damage caused by industrial pollution be so strangely beautiful? Tar sands, mountaintop removal mining, fertilizer runoff, coal ash, factory farming and devastating oil spills aren’t exactly the stuff that stunning art is usually made of, but Fair is no ordinary artist, forcing us to face the duality of what we’ve created.

Shooting these scenes from the air gives us a perspective we don’t normally have, as if we’re flying over them in person, reckoning with the damage that comes with our consumption of fossil fuels, large-scale farmed meat, chemicals and other commodities that do significant harm to the environment in their sourcing and manufacturing.

Coal combustion waste may not be pretty, but its splashes of rust and bronze against its black and white surroundings are undeniably striking. Some heavy metals, like ‘red mud’ bauxite waste from aluminum production, are almost floral in their contrast to green.  Oil from the BP Deepwater Horizon spill is mesmerizing in its flowing red ribbons against the cobalt blue of the Gulf of Mexico waters. Phospho-gypsum fertilizer waste is a brilliant blue-green, like a gemstone; it contains both uranium and radium, piled dangerously close to drinking water aquifers.

“What interests me about this series is its essential irony and hope,” he says. “The thinking person participating in the modern world understands that all of us are living unsustainably, the impending consequences on our economy are real and significant. But in fact, with a little effort and luck, these limitations could be overcome, ensuring a secure future. And so we must hope, as we are all invested. My goal is to produce beautiful images that stimulate an aesthetic response, and thus dialog. If the pictures are not beautiful, the viewer will not stop to consider them.”

These images and many more are available in the form of a hardcover book set to be released on July 6th, ‘Industrial Scars: The Hidden Costs of Consumption.’