Folding and flexible geometric forms seem to weave in and out of the structures graced with murals by David Louf (known as Mr. June), seeming to imply what a blank facade could have been in the past or become in some imagined future.

Louf toys with a combination of reality and abstraction. Depending on the piece, he sometimes hints at hidden doors, windows and interior spaces. In other cases, his work appears to deconstruct spacetime itself through layered voids.

His murals have been painted everywhere from Miami and Denver to Aruba, China and Berlin, Germany, each a collaboration with his graphic design studio and an exploration of architectural speculation, like science fiction in art form.

Each piece is naturally site-specific, drawing on the materials and structure of the setting, playing up existing features while imagining new details, many of which warp reality around them. See videos of his works in progress above.

New York City never sleeps, they say, and this animation shows just how active the city is by day and at night, combining elements of both in one film that represents “22 Trips to New York, 352 Hours of filming, $1,430 paid in Parking Fees, 9988 Miles Driven, and 232,000 Pictures Taken.” The result is a breathtaking architectural animation that becomes increasingly surreal as you watch.

“Traditional time-lapses are constrained by the idea that there is a single universal clock,” explains creator Julian Tryba. “In the spirit of Einstein’s relativity theory, layer-lapses assign distinct clocks to any number of objects or regions in a scene. Each of these clocks may start at any point in time, and tick at any rate. The result is a visual time dilation effect known as layer-lapse.”

The filmmaker quit his job a few years ago after the success of his Boston Layer-Lapse film and began focusing his next project on the Big Apple. To level things up, he began writing code to deal with the myriad more images this new piece would involve. “To create a layer-lapse effect, I am assigning a unique equation to hundreds of buildings simultaneously. For each frame, every building is calculating and deciding which time of day to reveal. One example of a script that yields a ‘look’ are the waves of day or night that move through some of the shots in this film.”

“To achieve the ‘look’ I can set parameters like the speed at which the wave moves across the screen, how rapidly each layer will switch from day to night or vice versa, and I’ll often use a random sinusoidal function to create a subtle oscillation inside the wave itself. Now I’ve probably lost half my audience but for those of you still reading, the final step is linking an action or a script to a piece of the music.” In the end, the work is a combination of mathematical and manual animation.

Historically, most maps use grid systems with latitude and longitude and distance measurements to guide users, but what if the emphasis was on time rather than space? Peter Liu of Mapbox has a new way of getting people from Point A to Point B based on the amount of time it would take someone to travel the distance.

Consider urban maps for tourists with circular overlays giving a sense of time-based distance through a single circular overlay — these often function in theory, but practically are oversimplified. Liu has developed a dynamic time map expanding on this idea, composed of concentric circles that serves as a reference for any (time-based) distance from any given point.

In essence, it is collapsing a step many of us already take — find places nearby, then plug the results into Google Maps, pick a mode of transit and see how long it will take. But it takes the idea to the next level: imagine rings radiating out from wherever you’re standing, giving you distances dynamically and using time, not space, as the metric for travel. Or an even more advanced variant: the rings rippling and bending like spacetime based on obstructions, traffic and other static as well as realtime factors.

Located along a tectonic fault, the town of Hollister, California, acts like an earthquake in slow motion, its surfaces slipping past one another along a ragged line visible in everything from skewed traffic lines and split sidewalks to entirely torqued houses.

As Geoff Manaugh neatly summarizes on BldgBlog, “Hollister is an inhabitable catalog of misalignment and disorientation, bulging, bending, and blistering as it splits right down the middle.” Thanks to inexorable forces of geology at work far below, “The entire west half of Hollister is moving north along the Calaveras Fault, leaving its eastern streets behind.”

Instead of the sudden and devastating motion we normally associate with earthquakes, Hollister suffers the movements of rocks below at more geological than human speeds, its buildings and infrastructure ever-so-slowly twisted through the passage of time. At a rate of one inch per five years, the change is not noticeable on a daily basis, but dramatic over the decades.

There are elements of Alice’s Wonderland all over the urban landscape: “Curbs at nearly the exact same spot on opposite sides of the street are popped out of alignment. Houses too young to show this level of wear stand oddly warped, torqued out of synch with their own foundations, their once strong frames off-kilter. The double yellow lines guiding traffic down a busy street suddenly bulge northward—as if the printing crew came to work drunk that day—before snapping back to their proper place a few feet later.”

Manaugh also traveled to a nearby bridge in Parkfield where a road bridge spans the San Andreas Fault, its distortions the ultimate manifestation of fault creep as each anchored side moves in the opposite direction. Built straight across, curves are already visible as one sights along the structure.

His photos here and elsewhere capture many of the region’s “minor landmarks for the seismic tourist,” which, “for all their near-invisibility, visiting can still provide a mind-altering experience.” All images by Geoff Manaugh.

Founded by futurists to engage in truly long-term thinking, the Long Now Foundation is best known to many for Long Bets or its recent placement of a Rosetta Disk on a comet, but the organization has an array of amazing projects designed to last hundreds of generations, including a 10,000 Year Clock. Something to consider before we go any further: civilization as we know it is arguably only around 5,000 years old – we are talking here about an technologically sophisticated endeavor aiming to span (and keep track of) twice that period of time.

Designers and builders are used to thinking in terms of decades, perhaps even centuries, but are rarely called upon to consider millennia in their plans and calculations. In the case of the 10,000 Year Clock, environment is critical – in addition to robust materials and geological stability, predictable temperatures and relative isolation are key ingredients in siting the mechanism. Towering 500 feet vertically and with gears weighing up to 1,000 pounds each, the first clock is being built high and dry inside a West Texas mountain on property owned by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos. Another is planned for Nevada – both are sited to avoid excessive rain or freeze-and-thaw cycles that could damage it over time.

In the conceptual design stage of the project, polymath inventor Danny Hillis said of his aspirations: “I want to build a clock that ticks once a year. The century hand advances once every 100 years, and the cuckoo comes out on the millennium. I want the cuckoo to come out every millennium for the next 10,000 years.” Indeed, the experience of the clock has even more unique twists than initially envisioned: each time it chimes the sound is unique – with 3.5 million melodies in store, it will not repeat itself for the next ten thousand years.

Located in a separate space from the clock’s inner workings, the face of the clock “displays the natural cycles of astronomical time, the pace of the stars and the planets, and the galactic time of the Earth’s procession.” Prototype parts of the clock are on display in some places, like the Long Now’s bar and event space in San Francisco known as The Interval, where this author recently saw Kevin Kelly, board member of Long Now and founding editor of Wired, speak about his book and history with the organization.

Perhaps most impressive of all: the clock can keep itself going for the entirety of is planned existence. While it will not display the time unless wound it will continue to keep track, using the sun and stars for guidance and temperature differentials for power. “Thermal power has been used for small mantel clocks before, but it has not been done before at this scale. The differential power is transmitted to the interior of the Clock by long metal rods. As long as the sun shines and night comes, the Clock can keep time itself, without human help. But it can’t ring its chimes for long by itself, or show the time it knows, so it needs human visitors.”

While this kind of working technology over such a long time period has almost no precedent, there are many examples of things surviving for such long periods – human-made ceramics have lasted up to 17,000 years along with other artifacts. The biggest worries? Some moving parts will not shift for generations, so making them able to work after a millennium without motion may be tricky. And then there are human visitors, well known for vandalizing and stealing from historical sites over time – we may, once again, be our own worst enemies.

As shown in the video above, “This system will be suspended 400ft down in the 500ft deep shaft that was carved using a raise bore drill last year. The large structural elements and gears are made from marine grade 316 stainless steel, most smaller pins and rollers are titanium, and the bearings are all made from an industrial ceramic. The entire system uses no lubrication, but the first tests have shown that over 93% of the energy put into the system, comes back out to go to the Clock.”