This excellent documentary is a blast from the past and shows with great precision where we have come from and where we may be going in the world of tech and the culture surrounding it since 1995. In doing so, it reframes our relationship with so many things we’ve become so comfortable with…and also has a fabulous retro design sensibility that’s sure to inspire.

Is reality obsolete? From low-tech function like body piercing and artificially-stocked fishing pools, to the latest in bionics and VR gaming, Iara Lee’s cyber-age intellectual survey—call it a *.DOCumentary—downloads a Future Shockful of data and defines the parameters of advanced technologies that delete nature and reprogram mankind.

Cryonics defy death; the Internet exists outside time and space; smart drugs and surgery upgrade the mind and body. But are we headed toward human optimization or system crash? Timothy Leary, RU Sirius, Lisa Palac, John Barlow, and others offer sound bytes against a mesmerizing screen display of cutting-edge computer graphics and archival clips. Exhilarating and disturbing, Synthetic Pleasures raises issues nobody today can afford to abort / retry / ignore.

Conceived as an electronic road movie, Synthetic Pleasures, directed by Iara Lee and produced by George Gund, investigates cutting-edge technologies and their influences on our culture. It explores the idea that mankind’s effort to tap the power of nature has been so successful that a new world is suddenly emerging, an artificial reality, a supernature. The film presents the implications of having access to such power as we all scramble to inhabit our latest science fictions.