‘Landscape Futures’ Exhibit at the Nevada Museum of Art Explores Our Relationship With Technology

Nature makes data -- and to a certain extent, what that data is, how we receive it and how we perceive it, determines our ability to properly manage our environment. The <a href="http://www.nevadaart.org/">Nevada Museum of Art</a> is currently hosting an exhibition made up of a collection of art pieces that represent how nature is perceived by a group of artists. The visions represented in the works are as far ranging as a future world inhabited by nanobots, to a world changed by in-demand resources, to land populated by machines that give humans animal superpowers. The exhibit may sound like a dystopian sci-fi film, but it in fact manages to reveal much about what we have still to treasure. Curated by Geoff Manaugh (of Inhabitat favorite <a href="http://bldgblog.blogspot.com/">BldgBlog</a>), hit the jump for a closer look at the exhibition <em>Landscape Futures</em>.

Landscape Futures features devices, photographs, installations, kinetic sculptures, drawings and ideas about our relationship to technology, data and place.

This device by Chris Woeboken and Kenichi Okada gives human the superpowers of an ant, allowing them to magnify their own vision through artificial "antennae", and to see amazing detail in their surrounding environment.

This forest of over 4,000 wooden dowels by Lateral Office (Mason White and Lola Sheppard) is called The Active Layer. It sits on 10 modular wooden floor plates and creates a stunning topography.

In this room-sized contraption by Mark Smout &amp; Laura Allen (Smout Allen) called "Surface Tension," disks and wires suggestive of the early days of computers arc and tilt in mechanized motions.

The panels of "Surface Tension" suggest both tetonic plates and the bubble of water atop a just over-filled glass.

In a related piece by The Living, photographs of artic miners are displayed next to testing strips, presenting an alternative future in which resources are only available in artic regions and must be hunted down by solo scavengers.