art

As much as we love the actual future here at Popular Science, we love the past's vision of the future almost as much. So we basically freaked out when our good friends over at Pink Tentacle discovered this spread from a 1969 issue of the Japanese magazine Shonen Sunday.

These pictures show a predicted 1989 where computers have changed how we live. The above photo depicts a classroom full of children learning on computers, watching a video of a teacher, and receiving beatings from enforcement robots.

[ Read Full Story ]

The littlest gold miners, the tidiest bees, and the least fun Wii game ever. Welcome to this week's Future.

[ Read Full Story ]

As an electronics mega-retailer, Best Buy isn't normally interested in anything but moving huge quantities of TVs, computers and appliances out of its gaping doors. But the Houston St. location in Manhattan did something unexpected last night: it approvingly looked the other way while video artist Borna Sammak took over every single HDTV in the store for to display his latest work.

[ Read Full Story ]

Who says there's no beauty in making your computer spaz out on screen? In new book Glitch: The Design of Imperfection over 200 contributors took inspiration from those silicon freakouts to provide beautiful visuals that make the Windows BSOD look like the cold authoritarian artifact that it is.

[ Read Full Story ]

Hiroshi Sugimoto is one of the most interesting photographers working today--his meditative sea- and landscapes, done with long exposures on large-format black and white film, present nature in a austerity that borders on abstraction. Now he's taken his look at the natural world one step further by enlisting the help of a 40,000 volt Van de Graaff generator to apply voltage directly to the film, capturing electricity's wild patterns in the process.

[ Read Full Story ]

Most of the Photoshop tools familiar to artists import old school analog devices onto the computer. Before computers, artists would use actual razors to crop, and physical scissors and glue to cut and paste. But South Korean designer Jinsun Park has envisioned a pen that reverses the process, taking a tool developed for the computer and porting it to physical reality.

[ Read Full Story ]

Hara Woltz's clients don't say much -- mostly just ribbit. A landscape architect and biologist at Columbia University, Woltz has undertaken the daunting task of creating road-crossing tunnels for amphibians and reptiles, based on different animals' preferences for different tunnel attributes. Building herpetological crosswalks might seem absurd, but the stakes are high: nearly one-third of the world's amphibian species and many of its reptiles are spiraling toward extinction due to habitat loss and fragmentation from human development.

[ Read Full Story ]

In the computer science lab where they work at MIT, Erik and Martin Demaine have a three-foot-tall metal and plastic sculpture that resembles a sleek, modernist version of a child's Tinkertoy creation.

[ Read Full Story ]