Bladerunner is one of my favorite movies. It shows us what a world our world might look like if capitalism over-extends and Time’s Square essentially swallows New York, and if our dependency on technology reaches a point of complacency. I’m all for capitalism and technology, but anything can get out of hand.

This is a digital work by Espen Olsen Sætervik. He plays with scale in his landscapes to make fantastical images. I like pieces like this because it raises questions that lead to an even more fantastical image. In this case the question is: “what on Earth used that sword”?

This drawing was made by NickyBonestein, another Instagram artist. His work is an inspiration to me simply because of his technical drawing skill. His work is mostly made with just a pencil or sharpie but is consistent in it’s forms and style. Even though I draw more than some, I sometimes find it hard to nail down a single technique or aesthetic.

This is concept art from a video game called Star Citizen. It has been in development for quite some time and is, in my opinion, the most ambitious video game in history. What’s important about it to me, though, is the models for the game’s ships. Every ship is modeled with an intense focus on detail and function, which, as I’ve said, I love. In producing the game’s ships, artists first map out every function that the ship is supposed to have and dedicate parts of the ship for the required modules and tools. The result is realism. These ship models are what made me realize I wanted to work in 3D modeling.

This is a “Tripod Walker” from H.G. Wells’s, War of the Worlds, which is a favorite book of mine. Technology must be based in realism: if you input a problem there is an output that is the most efficient and effective, so logically, most useful technology could be understood by us. However, my fascination with alien things that we cannot understand draws me to this design. The reasons for building such a thing are not the reasons we as humans would be concerned with, we would never build something in this manner and yet it is superior.

This is concept art for Alien made by H.R. Geiger. He is considered largely responsible for much of today’s sci-fi horror works through his creation of Alien. I first saw Alien when I was very young and it instilled a love for sci-fi horror in me. The Lovecraftian idea that space could be filled with unspeakable horrors is not only theoretically true but fascinating, if only because humans are fascinated by what we don’t understand. Through this fascination we want to understand. In the case of Alien, I’m intrigued in a similar way to the District 9 mech, because the art has function. Alien has entirely thought out mechanisms of reproducing and defense that are innovative and unique, and since the audience wants to understand these mechanisms, they learn more about them along with the film’s characters.

This is a concept image from an anime series called Evangelion, which is a retelling of Genesis through the eyes of a teenage boy who is instructed by his father to pilot a giant robot in order to fight humanity’s biggest threat, destructive beings called Angels. Evangelion, like much sci-fi work the is beloved by me, contains the subject matter of horror in merging mechanical and biological forms, or in other words, playing god. The robots used to fight the angels were built out of necessity, but it is later revealed that they weren’t really built, but repurposed from previous iterations of the inhuman Angels. The result is a message that is all too relevant today: how far will we go? In the case of protecting ourselves, would we utilize something diabolical and, in our own eyes, disgusting? The robotic exterior of these robots were made with human eyes in order to conceal the darker truth of what the robots are. What tools do we use for good that, in reality, have dark and revolting pasts?

This is an image of an alien mech-suit from Neil Blomkamp’s movie District 9. I’ve always been fascinated with functional art, be it a tool, a creature, a weapon, or whatever. This mech clearly has an artist’s hand in it, it’s form is unique and memorable and it moves with some personality, but the design of the mech is also functional. Every part of it serves a purpose, and were it real, it’s design would more or less makes sense for the purpose it would be built for (seemingly that would be violence in this case). Art that takes function into account even when it doesn’t need to is great to me.

Hayao Miyazaki’s movies hold a special place in my heart. Spirited Away is maybe the first movie I remember watching. The sheer beauty of almost every single frame in these movies makes me want to preserve them, and he knows it. He often deals in the theme of the corruption of something pure. Every beautiful thing in his movies, which are countless, is threatened by the plot. His movies are fantastic examples of a movie’s art emotionally tying into it’s story, which in my opinion is a higher level of art. Something that looks beautiful simply because it’s nice is also great in my eyes, but I respect a person who wants to think through why the art should be beautiful, and why it should matter to the audience.