Happy Monday! It’s National Columnists’ Day, so please show this post some love on AN’s Twitter or Facebook. Here’s what you need to know today:

LACMA and Snapchat team up for augmented reality monuments in Los Angeles

Today the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) and Snapchat released a second edition of what the museum and social media are calling “AR monuments.”

LACMA × Snapchat: Monumental Perspectives features the three augmented reality pieces by mostly local artists that investigate the interplay between memory and landscape. The artists build the work in collaboration with AR creators using Snapchat’s technology. This edition spotlights Judy Baca, Sandra de la Loza, and Kang Seung Lee, three artists exploring changing landscapes and memory via site-specific digital installations around Los Angeles.

Starting today, Kang Seung Lee’’s la revolución es la solución! will launch at Algin Sutton Recreation Center while Sandra de La Loza’s What the Willow Whispers will debut at Earvin “Magic” Johnson Park. Judy Baca’s The River Once Ran will launch at a later date.

You don’t have to be in LA to enjoy the monuments, however. All three can be accessed worldwide via Snapchat’s Lens Explorer or by scanning the Snapcodes here.

Ellen DeGeneres is in the gorilla-saving game

Talk show Ellen DeGeneres host has been accused of treating her staff poorly on set, but the comedian clearly has a soft spot for large mammals. Recently, DeGeneres and her wife Portia de Rossi provided major funding for a 12-acre gorilla conservation complex in Rwanda designed by MASS Design Group. 

Architectural Digest reports the Boston-based firm designed the Ellen DeGeneres Campus of the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund as three curvy stone-clad buildings with planted roofs that meld with their natural surroundings. The complex includes “housing, [a] fully equipped laboratory, classrooms for visiting students, and a museum complete with a 360-degree theater.” The firm tapped Minneapolis’s Ten x Ten for a landscape incorporating 250,000 native plants.

H/t to Architectural Digest

Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) presents exhibitions, programming on Indigenous spacemaking

Montreal’s Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) is launching a curatorial project that examines the spaces created by the Inuit, Sámi, and other Indigenous communities in the north of Canada. 

An announcement for the program explains the project’s rationale and intellectual grounding: “Historically, architecture has been a tool of oppression for many Indigenous communities; subverting this relationship requires supporting northern Indigenous design knowledges, specifically those rooted in living on and with the land, which inform Indigenous-led approaches to the contemporary practice of architecture.”

Joar Nango, Taqralik Partridge, Jocelyn Piirainen, and Rafico Ruiz will co-curate Angirramut / Ruovttu Guvlui / Towards Home, which encompasses a summer festival, exhibition, design workshop, and publication. The program begins on June 11.

H/t to e-flux

NASA to test slingshot rocket launcher to space

SpinLaunch, a space tech firm, has revealed the design for its A-33 Suborbital Mass Accelerator that will launch items while attached to a NASA spacecraft.

SpinLaunch employs a carbon fiber arm that rotates inside a 300-foot-wide diameter steel vacuum chamber to launch a rocket with less fuel. It will spin the launched craft up to 5,000 miles per hour.

H/t to the New York Post