Subway commuters are inundated with advertisements on virtually every surface they come across along their daily journey, from the stairs leading to each platform to the passenger cars themselves. Places where a captive audience will stand around staring at the walls are an advertiser’s feast, but not everyone wants that kind of consumerism shoved down their throats every day. Enter ‘NO AD,‘ an augmented reality app that allows you to replace those ads with art.

Created by The Subway Art Blog and The Heavy Projects, which got dozens of artists to participate, the app for smartphones and tablets enables users to look at their environment in an altered way. Hold up your device and the ad that’s right in front of you will transform into a work of art before your eyes.

Available for free on iOS and Android, NO AD works with dozens of ads, turning your commute into a ‘curated art experience. You can even watch a short film. The app developers plan to update the featured art frequently to keep up with the frantic pace of urban advertising.

While viewing the world through an electronic device isn’t exactly ideal, especially if hundreds of commuters started clogging up the subway stations to stand around holding their tablets at arms’ length, it’s a neat example of high-tech DIY Urbanism.

A floating airport off Battery Park, a mile-high dome over Midtown Manhattan and a hulking Harlem in the sky… these structures may not actually exist in New York City, but tourists can still explore them. An iPhone app created by a pair of architects illuminates the phantom New York – an alternate vision that lies just behind the reality of the city.

“It’s the city that never was but could have been,” co-creator Irene Cheng told The New York Times. “Sort of an alternate future.”

Called ‘Museum of the Phantom City’, the free download is “a public art project that allows individuals to browse visionary designs for the City of New York on their iPhones.”

The designs might not be terribly practical, but they’re as stunning as they are eccentric, and Cheng and her husband Brett Snyder believe that they push the technological, aesthetic and social boundaries of their time.

Users walking through the city are notified when passing a phantom building such as Antonio Gaudi’s unbuilt cathedral, Buckminster Fuller’s dome and even a 1941 proposal for a helicopter landing field to be built on steel pylons over Bryant Park.

Pink and white bursts on a black field – which is actually a thinly veiled, intentionally mysterious Google map – indicate proposal sites. A pink burst means that the user is within range of a site, and can access the photos and text. An interactive rating feature allows the user to vote on whether each proposal is utopian or dystopian, sublime or subversive, a beauty or a beast.

Though some may lament the use of personal digital devices to interact with our urban environments, Phantom City provides an experience that is otherwise impossible – an experience that may leave some yearning for the decidedly more imaginative science fiction of these nearly-forgotten dreams.