Parents share how their family day turned into a nightmare after they were caught in the middle of a police intervention.

If we were to travel 500 years into the future, what would the monuments decorating public parks and town squares commemorate? Thomas Doyle takes us on an unnerving journey to imagine the culture we might encounter should our endless fascination with technology continue.

The New York-based artist (previously) toys with perception as he sculpts miniature works at 1:43 scale and smaller. His new dystopian series, Clear History, invokes classical Greek and Roman sculpture, although the venerated figures appear more as a warning than an ideal. Sharp rays pierce through a woman’s head in “Clickthrough rate,” for example, while the hunched protagonist of “Opt in” demonstrates the neck-cranking posture many of us know all too well.

Interested in the long tail of culture, Doyle frequently looks to the past to better understand the consequences of our present. “I’m fascinated by the way we are hurtling toward what seems to be a new way of being human, leaping without looking, hoping for the best,” he says.

In each of the mixed-media scenes, tiny figures peer up at or sit near the weathered statues as they consider a world that’s come and gone. “The trappings of past cultures are all around us, morphed and made nearly unrecognizable over centuries,” the artist adds. “I’ve tried to trace the ways in which today’s technologies will reverberate over time. What will grow from the seeds we plant today? What becomes a venerated symbol? What serves as a cautionary myth?”

Doyle currently has a few models on view at the Ukrainian National Museum in Chicago, and he very generously shares glimpses behind the scenes on Instagram.

Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $7 per month. The article In Miniature Models, Thomas Doyle Envisions an Unsettling Future of Technological Takeover appeared first on Colossal.

A small Quebec town is using a novel approach to encourage residents to plant trees by charging a $200 annual surtax to homeowners who don't have at least one tree in their front yard. The municipality said the trees are necessary to mitigate the impact of heat islands in the community.