Artist Nathaniel Stern’s Depictions of Recent Technology in the Distant Future

It’s known that our iPhones will outlive us all. In fact, most mixed-material technology from the last few decades does not get properly recycled; waste management systems are not even in place to do so. Thus, as Fast Company states, “the scale of our technology waste is astronomical.” Wisconsin-based artist Nathaniel Stern probes this in his most recent exhibition, The World After Us: Imaging techno-aesthetic …

Toyota’s City of the Future at the Base of Mount Fuji

Announced at CES 2020, Toyota has an ambitious plan for a newly redeveloped 175-acre site at the foot of Japan’s Mount Fuji. Ground will officially break next year on Woven City, a Bjarke Ingels Group-designed prototype town meant for piloting mobility services, in-home and public technologies, and connected innovations. Autonomous vehicles will be the only cars allowed in this pedestrian-centric city. Green space will takes …

MIT Scientists’ “4D Materials” Shape-Shift into Human Face

Nicknamed “active origami,” and referred to as a shape-morphing system, an MIT-developed “4D material” begins flat but can blossom into something more complicated when its surrounding conditions change. Specifically, its 3D-printed lattice structure, which mimics mesh, expands through temperature variation and actually turns into the face of scientist Carl Friedrich Gauss. The visual was reverse engineered and Gauss was selected as the sculptural result to …