In Japan, digital megaliths emerge from the floor of an abandoned bath house, coming alive with animated flowers and water in a beautiful mash-up of light art, projections and abandoned places. Multidisciplinary collective TeamLab designed the work to continuously render in real time, so it’s neither pre-recorded nor on a loop.

The concept of the project is that non-material digital technology, i.e. TeamLab’s illusory projections, can transform nature into art without harming it. While “Megaliths in the Bath House Ruins” inserts strange illusory structures into an abandoned space, “Graffiti Nature,” another exhibit in the show, imagines local endangered wildlife as living graffiti. As seen in the rest of TeamLab’s work, the projections are interactive, moving and changing according to the way visitors move, so the show is never exactly the same twice.

TeamLab speaks of the bath house and its forested surroundings in terms of “space-times,” exploring the relationship of this particular exhibit to its larger “A Forest Where Gods Live, Ruins and Heritage, The Nature of Time” show.

“The forest surrounding the bath house ruins is home to 3,000-year-old trees, and it changes daily with the imperceptible, slow flow of time, repeating every year, as a space where the endlessly long time accumulates. The ruins from ages past scattered in the forest and the Edo-period garden which remains today each have their own respective space-times. The bath house was made in modern times, but after just a short period, it was abandoned, becoming a space-time where time had stopped completely. And this group of megaliths is also a mass made up of compressed space-times where the flow of time varies. Here, various space-times intersect and overlap.”

“Each megalith is surrounded by similarly standing megaliths, the space-times of which are all connected. Furthermore, these space-times are connected to those of other megaliths distributed around the world. Artworks move between the megaliths, traveling between the nearby megaliths in the same space, as well as through the megaliths around the world. The works within the space-time influence each other.”

The show takes place at the 500,000-square-meter Mifuneyama Rakuen Park, which includes the famous 3,000-year-old sacred Okuso tree of the Takeo Shrine and another 300-year-old sacred tree located at the center of the garden. TeamLab is particularly interested in the vague boundaries between the manicured garden and the wild forest, and between our current time and the experiences of the people who have interacted with the space over millennia.

As with any TeamLab exhibit, there’s a lot to see here. Check out the video of “A Forest Where Gods Live” for digital projections onto natural spaces within the park, and head to the group’s website for lots more photos, videos and info.

Stretched and exaggerated almost to the point of absurdity, otherwise ordinary architecture takes on a bit of an uncanny feeling. Digital artist Alex Lysakowski describes it as “imaginary magnitude,” a change in proportion that’s a bit too extreme to be real, but straddling the line, sometimes making the viewer unsure whether they’re looking at a real building.

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For his series “Antistructure,” Lysakowski manipulates photos of buildings and the cargo boxes of trucks to create fictional structures that look a bit like monuments, standing tall in mundane settings.

“Antistructure is a body of work that focuses on exaggerated architectural forms within banal spaces. The farcical nature of the manipulated structures creates a surreal world of absurdity in an otherwise mundane landscape eluding to an environment beyond the realm of any real architectural forms but still preserving the potential for their existence.”

Lysakowski says his father is a chemical engineer, and as a child, he’d flip through engineering manuals and catalogs in his home office, filling his head with ideas about what could be made with the components. Maybe the results shouldn’t be real, from an engineering perspective, but there’s something fascinating about the possibility.

Check out more of Alex Lysakowski’s work on Instagram @mdviii_mcmxc.

Japanese art director Yuni Yoshida is well known for her surreal digital creations, particularly those manipulating the human body into unnatural forms, but a new series takes the opposite approach. “Layered” is a collection of food photography in which fruit, burgers and other food items are cut apart and rearranged in pixelated or spliced forms, making them look like Photoshopped images.

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For the pixelated series, Yoshida selected the color palette in a given arrangement of food and sourced “pixels” from a variety of other foods to recreate the tones. Look closely at the “pixels” in the pineapple image, for example, and you’ll see that most of them aren’t pineapple at all, but the effect is brilliant.

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Yoshida uses a variety of techniques to achieve her signature surrealist style, from obvious digital manipulations to clever use of materials and photography angles. You can follow her work on Instagram.

The “Layered” series is yet another example of imagery that appears to be Photoshopped, but really isn’t. Check out 36 more fake-looking photos.

Look at architectural renderings on a regular basis and soon you’ll start to spot stylized elements that pop up often enough to be called cliches, every one of them inserted into the image for a specific purpose. It’s all about selling the viewer on the concept, consciously and subconsciously, like any other form of marketing. The point of architectural renderings is typically to convince the client, the investors and the public at large that the project (and, specifically, the architect’s vision) deserves funding and support. They make it possible to envision what it will look like before ground is broken, not just visually but emotionally.

The best tactic to sell someone something, after all, is to appeal to their needs and desires. What does the public want out of a new museum or seaside park? How does a wealthy bachelor see himself in a new home? What can help convince investors that a project is prestigious enough to justify their participation? Sometimes it all comes down to a kid with a balloon, an otherworldly glow or lots and lots of fireworks.

The use of storytelling tools in architectural proposals certainly isn’t new. Back when they were all drawn by hand, renderings still had their tropes: a Zeppelin in the sky beside every tower, a futuristic skyline implying a certain cutting edge quality to the project. Today, there are enough digital tools to make the process of producing a convincing rendering easier than ever. Artists use programs like Revit and Sketchup along with Photoshop to depict architectural models in real world settings, often with photorealistic attention to detail. They can download packs of human figures dubbed “scalies” along with other elements like furniture, trees and kayaks.

Yeah, about those kayaks. Renderings are selling us an idealized version of reality, and that often means plopping structures into sanitized fictional scenes straight out of a Norman Rockwell painting or 1950s-era Archie Comics. There might be far more kayaks than technically warranted in one image, but they’re showing us how fun, lively and adventurous that project could be. The same goes for bicycles, rollerblades and kites. Hot air balloons are a hell of a lot more ubiquitous in renderings than they are in real life. See how lively the scene is? Don’t you want to go there?

So-called “scalies” are fascinating in their own right. Sometimes they’re translucent to keep the focus on the building itself, giving them a ghostly quality. These, too, are all carefully chosen: mothers pushing babies in strollers, students lugging backpacks, businessmen striding with briefcases in hand, shoppers struggling with armloads of purchases. Supermodel types stand around in evening gowns for no apparent reason other than adding to the ambiance. As with any form of marketing, sometimes there’s a scantily clad woman just to catch your eye. It can almost become a game of Where’s Waldo.

Then there’s the atmosphere. As crucial as lighting is to make a rendering realistic, sometimes designers just can’t resist adding all manner of effects to give the scene some extra shine. Lens flares and light trails are common, but even more egregious is the sort of artificial glow a building will never actually emit in real life. Glass facades are almost always portrayed as completely transparent in renderings when they’ll really be more like mirrors, changing the look of the structure altogether.

Overhead, there just happens to be a tranquil flock of birds, once again reinforcing the liveliness of the scene. The structure is so dazzling, wildlife is inexplicably drawn to it, even in the middle of the city. Maybe the structure is taken out of its real context and placed in a more pleasant setting, like a picturesque meadow.

Many renderings depict the architectural model in color while the rest of the scene is in black and white, blurred or lacking in detail.

The point, obviously, is just to keep the focus on the proposal, but the effect can be unsettling, as if the rest of the neighborhood has fallen into ruin. Look how great that building is – everything else pales in contrast!

A dark, moody dystopian quality can even be applied intentionally to give the scene a cinematic sense of drama, lending it a gravitas it might not have under blue skies.

The ubiquity of these elements has spawned many a think piece as well as parodies, like a series of comics based on architectural renderings of Future Memphis. And once you start noticing them, you can never un-see them.

None of this is to say these rendering tropes should never be included, or don’t achieve what they set out to do – but it’s fun to examine the details, and prudent to question their purpose and discuss how potentially unrealistic imagery can set us up for disappointment once the projects are finally complete.

What would Pablo Picasso think if he saw that another artist had transformed his two-dimensional Cubist works of art into three-dimensional form? While the MIMIC series by Omar Aqil was created digitally and doesn’t exist as physical objects, it’s easy to imagine each piece as a sculpture you can walk around and examine from all angles, and it certainly offers an interesting perspective on the originals.

Aqil used Photoshop, Illustrator and Cinema 4D-Ray to reimagine six of Picasso’s most dynamic, angular paintings, including Buste de femme dans un fauteuil (1949), Seated Woman (1930), Black Figure (1948), Visage (1928) and Composition (1946). Aquil explains that he’s been studying Picasso’s work since beginning his career in art, and has always found the abstract visual language inspiring.

“MIMIC is a series of new visual experiments using art from the past,” says the Pakistan-based artist. “In this project I have randomly picked 6 paintings from the Pablo Picasso’s (one of the greatest and most influential artists of the 20th century) work and recreate them into modern 3D visuals. In this visual mimicry I have shown, how the skill responds when it come across the complexity of someone’s thought and how the meanings of the shapes and forms have been changed and create new physical realities. It’s propose to give a new implication of Picasso’s artworks with a series of hyper-realistic visuals.”

The choice of ‘materials’ used in the renderings is interesting in and of itself; while some might have given them textures and finishes resembling more classic sculptural materials like stone, Aquil’s sculptural visions seem to be made of plastic, as if they could be sold as tchotchkes in museum shops.

Considering that Picasso is famously quoted as saying “Good artists copy, great artists steal,” perhaps he wouldn’t have minded.