Michael Massaia's photographs are as nostalgic as they are disturbing. His long-exposure images capture a subject matter familiar to most. From a SpongeBob SquarePants popsicle to a Neapolitan ice cream sandwich, he frames the frozen treats most people's summer memories are made of. Yet, Massaia doesn't just realistically render his ice cream. He distorts the childhood favorites by melting them before his lens, until the pops resemble ominous pools of paint or celestial snapshots.

Tempering the violence of modern weaponry with charmingly rendered creatures, artist Xiau-Fong Wee captures a dark humor in her quirky drawings. While some of the weapons appear terrifyingly realistic, others such as in the ray gun wielding bunny portrait, speaks more to the fantastical worlds of science fiction. The anthropomorphic dispositions of the spectacle-wearing creatures also range in merry reverie to stern seriousness, adding to the delightful nature of these well-executed portraits. View more of the drawings below.

Scaffolding holding a remnant of the Soviet Union, the hammer and sickle, is seen on a rooftop of an abandoned building in the town of Pripyat on January 25, 2006 near Chernobyl, Ukraine. The town of Pripyat, deserted since the 1986 catastrophe, once housed 30,000 people, the majority of being workers from the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant. Days after the catastrophe the inhabitants were relocated to other locations in the Soviet Union. The town of Pripyat has remained uninhabited since. Prypyat and the surrounding area will not be safe for human habitation for several centuries. Scientists estimate that the most dangerous radioactive elements will take up to 900 years to decay sufficiently to render the area safe.

“The Lockheed Martin X-33 is an unmanned, sub-scale technology demonstrator suborbital spaceplane developed in the 1990s under the U.S. government-funded Space Launch Initiative program”. – Wikipedia

Photo: An Artist's Rendering Shows How Nasa's X-33 Technology Demonstrator, A Cost-Cutting Fully Reusable Single-Stage-To-Orbit Space Vehicle, Will Look Upon Completion. The 67 Foot-Long, 278,600 Pound, Twin Engine Space Vehicle, Capable Of Reaching Speeds In Excess Of Mach 15, Will Lead To The Construction Of A 127 Foot-Long, 2,186,000 Pound Version With Seven Engines And A 50,000 Pound Payload Capacity Called The “Venturestar”. (Photo By Nasa/Getty Images)

Joshua Hoffine, based in Kansas City, Mo., and a self-proclaimed “Horror Photographer”, is interested in the psychology of fear. In his project “After Dark, My Sweet”, Hoffine’s surreal and staged images render these fears visible with the “visual grammar of a child”. Through elaborate sets, costumes, makeup and fog machines, Hoffine’s children act out these terrifying scenes in front of his camera. Here: “Basement”. (Photo by Joshua Hoffine/The Washington Post)

Customer Andreas Kroker looks at a 3D-printed figure of himself at the Twinkind 3D printing studio in Berlin, December 13, 2013. A 3D-printed likeness is produced by taking a 360 degree photographic scan of a person, which is then rendered into a 3D digital model and retouched to meet the requirements for printing. The printing machine uses this digital model to produce a high-resolution solid figure. Twinkind co-founder Timo Schaedel said, people often come to the session well-groomed, with fresh hair-cuts and their best clothes, “just as they used to do in the past, when they had their portrait taken in a photo studio”. (Photo by Thomas Peter/Reuters)

For more than a century, the Barcelona skyline has been graced (or marred, depending on who’s talking) by the spectacle of the Basilica designed by Anton Gaudi, first started in 1882. If you want to know what it’ll look like when finished, don’t fret — 2026 is right around the corner. Or you can watch this video, released last week on YouTube by Basílica de la Sagrada Família and titled simply “2026 We Build Tomorrow,” a 3-D artists’ rendering of the building stages through completion.
(If 144 years sounds like a long time to finish a cathedral, keep in mind that there were decades that they didn’t work on it — and that Notre Dame de Paris took 182 years, although the 13th century Parisians didn’t have diesel-powered industrial cranes.) Now, if only the video could show us what the admission and hours will be in 2026 (and how to avoid the inevitable long lines).

At this year’s Venice Bienniale in Italy, the Korean pavilion has a curious exhibit called “Commissions for Utopia”. It includes renderings from North Korea’s top architects and artists (all anonymous), many of whom studied at the Paekho Institute of Architecture, North Korea’s state-run architectural college, and none of whom have ever left the country. They were asked to create a vision of North Korea’s future sustainable architecture for its expanding tourism industry. Their final products are a glimpse into what it would be like to envision the future after being entirely cut off from the present for almost 70 years. (Photo by Nick Bonner/Kyle Vanhemert/Venice Architecture Biennale)