What will the remains of our current civilization look like to future generations? The objects that we carelessly discard today will be tomorrow’s relics. Artist Victor Sonna takes those future relics and turns them into a sort of retro-futuristic (or perhaps futuristic-retro?) mix of aged components and future reuse.

(all images via: Designboom)

Sonna collects old, rusted industrial items that are no longer useful for their original intended purposes and turns them into fascinating bikes. The latest in his “Future Nostalgia” collection is a bike called Ipsum.

Ipsum is composed of an old rake, various bits of aged tools, and other industrial odds and ends. Each element shows its age with a unique patina of rust, flaked paint, and dents.

The artist describes his work as being inspired by the strength of destruction. He uses imperfect objects to create beautiful and unconventional works that question our very idea of what can be called beautiful.

Ipsum and the other bikes in the series are welded together to make them stable and feature functional wheels, pedals and chains so they should be rideable. Imagine how much waste could be kept out of landfills if every discarded object was suddenly seen for its inherent value rather than its past life as a no-longer-useful item.

The post Aged Industrial Parts Become a Retro-Style Sculptural Bike first appeared on Gajitz.

Ancient humans had no choice but to figure out how to use the raw materials around them to accomplish essential tasks. As modern people, we have the luxury of choosing from a variety of pre-made tools that even come with instructions for use. Designers Ami Drach and Dov Ganchrow taught themselves to make ancient tools and then used modern techniques to give the tools specific defined purposes.

The stone hand-axe is a prehistoric tool that was used for a very wide variety of purposes. It would have functioned as a weapon, a food preparation tool, an animal-skinning blade, and a number of other uses – but it would have had the same form when being used for all of these purposes.

Drach and Ganchrow used 3D printing to add parts onto hand-axes that would give each a specific purpose and make them easier to use. The “Man Made” project added plastic pieces to flint tools to create a spear, a clip-on belt to store a throwing weapon, a cutting/slicing tool, a tripod display case, a chisel, a digging tool, and a swinging axe-like tool.

By defining each hand tool, the duo narrowed the number of things the hand-axes could be used for but also made them easier to do those newly-defined jobs. They now have a luxury that ancient humans never had and would be shocked to see: a comfortable way to perform necessary tasks with simplistic tools.

The Man Made project combines old and new technology and points out the stark contrasts between the two. Simple pieces of sharpened flint are exceptionally primitive, while the digital mapped and 3D printing add-ons are decidedly 21st century. Who would have thought they could come together to form tools that are not only useful but strangely beautiful?

The post Gilded Butterflies: Ancient Tools Get 21st Century Upgrades first appeared on Gajitz.

Hugo Gernsback is known as one of the founders of science fiction, and his predictions and imagined gadgets were unlike anything the world had ever before imagined. One of his best-loved subjects was robots, though in the 1920s they were more commonly known as “automatons.” This conceptual radio-controlled police automaton was dreamed up by Gernsback in 1924 as the next generation of law enforcement. The wacky design was supposed to be a towering, bullet-proof monument to authority and crowd control.

Gernsback’s Radio Automaton would have been controlled from a remote location via radio waves. Its locomotion was achieved through jointed knees and feet equipped with caterpillar tracks. The internal design would have included a gyroscope to keep it upright along with a gasoline engine and a loudspeaker. Where it really gets scary, though, is the weapons. Each arm of the robot included lead balls attached to rotating disks which were meant to be used as “police clubs.” Pressurized tear gas was stored in the body to be dispensed through a curiously phallic nozzle. Gernsback saw them controlling unruly mobs and fighting wars, but of course, the ill-fated Radio Automaton went the way of most other robot designs of the early 20th century.

The post Gernsback’s Authoritarian Tin Man Rules With Iron Fist first appeared on Gajitz.

If there is one thing that has remained constant throughout the ages, it’s our capacity for envisioning what might happen in coming years. We’re fascinated with the future, and we never stop making predictions. In 1958, artist Arthur Radebaugh began the syndicated comic strip called Closer Than We Think! The strip was centered on making predictions about futuristic technology, and through its entire four-year run it brought plenty of crazy and not-so crazy predictions to the American public.

Radebaugh was surprisingly right on target with some of his predictions, such as factory farms and super-tiny televisions. Considering how much had to change between then and now to make these things possible – much less mainstream – it is rather astonishing that the futurist was able to predict them in 1958.

Other predictions made in the strip are things that we only wish had come true. The rotating sun-loving house is one of those. According to Radebaugh, homes of the future would be mounted on turntables and follow the sun to receive maximum light and heat from the sun all day long.

Still other predictions are best left in the realm of fantasy. The “throw-away clothes” predicted in a 1959 strip have thankfully not come to pass as of yet – and given the current state of the environment and dwindling landfill space, we rather hope they never do.

The post Closer Than We Think! Retrofuturistic Tech Predictions first appeared on Gajitz.

We thought modern technology made us lazy, but it turns out we’ve been looking for ways to stop moving for almost a century. In the 1930s, automated grocery stores were all the rage with futurists and housewives alike. Rather than dealing with the tedious task of walking through the grocery store to choose items one-by-one, the automated grocery store would let shoppers just have a seat as conveyor belts drove the entire inventory past. The conveyor belt shelves made a complete circuit every eight minutes, giving shoppers plenty of time to select everything they need to feed a hungry family.

Sitting at home ordering all manner of stuff online is pretty lazy, but it can be argued that sitting on a bar stool while the entire inventory of a grocery store marches past is even lazier.  This store was built in Los Angeles in 1933, but luckily the idea didn’t stick around long enough to turn us all into fat, lazy future people – we had to wait another 60 years or so for the Internet to do that for us.

The post 1930s Automated Stores Took Walking Out of Shopping first appeared on Gajitz.