There are places in the world where a single road, wall or an even thinner, more invisible line separates rich from poor, and those are the kinds of intersections captured by photographer Johnny Miller.

A student of anthropology, Miller started out using images to illustrate wealth disparities in South Africa, but has since gone on to photograph in India, Tanzania and even the United States. He spends much of his time scouring for locations, then charts a path to fly his photography drone.

“The images that I find the most powerful are when the camera is looking straight down—what’s known as ‘nadir view,’ looking at the actual borders between rich and poor,” he says of Unequal Scenes.

“Sometimes this is a fence, sometimes a road, or wetlands—with small shacks or poor houses on one side, and larger houses or mansions on the other.” At times, it’s the quality of the architecture, or its relative state of disuse, that defines these boundaries.

“Whatever it is about the composition of those photographs, they are extremely powerful to people. I think the images make inequality relevant—people can see themselves reflected in the images, and it’s deeply unsettling.”

His goal is to raise awareness, in part by publishing and displaying his pictures around the world. “Through these conversations we can begin to understand the scope of the problem, and through that understanding, we can develop solutions.”

The world’s largest solar power-producing nation is showing off its record-setting green energy production through an adorable new array shaped like a giant panda bear, the national animal of China.

This Panda Power Plant in Datong, China, was developed by Panda Green Energy in partnership with the United Nations Development Program. And this first sections of this huge creature-shaped station mosaic have just been hooked up to the grid.

The plant also going to grow — currently at 50 megawatts, the installation will have a capacity of 100 MW upon completion. Over the next 25 years, the array is estimated to provide as much power as 1 million tons of coal and to reduce CO2 emissions by over 2.5 million tons.

The whole panda figure is part of the power production process: darker parts of the animal shape (like legs and arms) are made up of monocrystalline silicone solar cells — gray areas (face and torso) are thin-film solar cells.

An educational center alongside the Panda Power Plant aims to teach children about the advantages of solar power and other forms of sustainable energy. Meanwhile, more panda plants are in planning phases as well across China, and some may also end up outside the country.

Though the apartheid ended decades ago, many physical barriers remain in South Africa, highly visible in the built environment … especially from above.

Roads, rivers and strips of open land captured by Cape Town-based photographer Johnny Miller illustrate the divide in a photo series dubbed Unequal Scenes.

Details give way to patterns in these birds-eye views, highlighting a landscape-scarring history of institutionalized segregation and inequality. Haphazard and densely packed shacks may fall on one side of a line while organized and expansive homes can be seen on the other, often separated by nearly-invisible lines.

“During apartheid, segregation of urban spaces was instituted as policy,” explains Miller, with “buffer zones of empty land, and other barriers were constructed and modified to keep people separate.” Even today, “communities of extreme wealth and privilege will exist just meters from squalid conditions and shack dwellings.”

“My desire with this project is to portray the most Unequal Scenes in South Africa as objectively as possible. By providing a new perspective on an old problem, I hope to provoke a dialogue which can begin to address the issues of inequality and disenfranchisement in a constructive and peaceful way.” Miller has an upcoming show this fall in Johannesburg for those who want to see his work large and up close, to be announced on his social feeds (via Colossal).

Hong Kong has inspired so many iconic images of urban density shot from the ground or horizontally across buildings, but seeing it from above via drone footage gives the city an entirely fresh dimension.

In this series of vertigo-inducing snapshots, photographer and unmanned aerial vehicle pilot Andy Yeung captures both the chaos and order, colorfulness and monotony, of one of the world’s most stunning urban centers.

Shot from hundreds of feet in the sky, the resulting views exceed even the relatively awesome ones attainable by tripping up to the top of the adjacent hillsides. An onlooker starts to get a sense of the combination of  rigorous order and organic evolution of the city.

“Technology can help nature understand itself,” says AUJIK, a self-proclaimed cult that melds faux mythologies, fictitious landscapes and wildly distorted architecture with a philosophy they call “animism for the Digital Age.” The quasi-spiritualist Japanese collective gives us a look into the world of their imagination via simulated drone footage, swooping us over and through their vision of nature awakened in a new way by technological integration.

“Since the late 2000’s, the online presence of mysterious nature/tech cult AUJIK quietly spread across video platforms featuring proposed active members and fabricated histories. These virtual appearances suggest decades-old lineage through theoretical schematics outlining their transgression emission, citing faux reports arguing the life of inanimate matter and modern forms of animism from fictional anthropologists and philosophers.”

“For AUJIK, nature is divided into Refined and Primitive categories. This separation presents a conflict that is the root of all chaos in the world, and in order to reach a sublime state, AUJIK generates rituals to harmonize the organic and synthetic realms. Refined nature consists of evolved technology such as robotics, artificial intelligence, cybernetics, DNA manipulations, and body enhancements. The Primitive includes fauna, flora, and the Earth itself with its precious stones, minerals, and metals.”

Natural settings, rocks, plants and even living creatures become something more than themselves, infused with a new power, growing in a way that they never actually could in our current reality, bound as it is by the laws of physics. Digital forces invade and transform everything from dark forests to dense cities, warping the architecture, creating a bizarre parallel universe.