Famously beautiful ginkgo trees provide the raw materials for this falling leaf artist, which are carefully raked to create site-specific, all-natural art on the campus of Sacramento State University.

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A post shared by Joanna Hedrick (@joanna_hedrick)

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A post shared by Joanna Hedrick (@joanna_hedrick)

Joanna Hedrick works at the school and has made these creations a kind of annual tradition,providing a backdrop for photos and a unique series of installation artworks for students — a great distraction right around finals time.

Using rakes, the artist creates complex maze, honeycomb, sunshine and other shapes, generally around a half-dozen per year. The idea is simple: take something already in place, then rearrange it to make something fun, interesting and a little different. Naturally, these works are eventually blown back into more abstract configurations, but that unraveling can be fascinating to watch, too.

Protecting better than conventional cases or edge bumpers, this “active dampening” unit acts like an airbag for your portable handheld gadget, springing to action as it heads toward the concrete sidewalk or hardwood floor below.

Award-winning German mechatronics design student Philip Frenzel designed the ADcase with four “legs” that auto-detect a phone’s fast motion, flipping out to slow it down upon impact. The protrusions can then be tucked back in for repeated use.

Currently a prototype, its popularity has already leant the innovation success in crowdfunding leading toward commercial production — the extra depth added by the attachment will also optionally house additional battery and a charger.

“Our vision with ADcase is a smartphone case that combines maximum protection with elegant design,” said Frenzel + Mayer Solutions, “a case that is so smart that it even makes a difference whether it’s in your hand, in your pocket, or in free fall.”

“While the case briefly takes on an alien, octopedal appearance when in active protection mode, it is designed to be slim and unobtrusive during regular phone use. It adds 0.6 millimetres to the rim of the phone and 4.6 millimetres in a card-sized protrusion on the back.” All in all, a pretty small price to pay for something that could save you the cost of a replacement device.

Like that iconic scene in the original Planet of the Apes film, these artists have displaced great works of architecture in time and space to see what each museum might look like after the end of days, relocated in ominous environments and recast in black and white.

Ukrainian photographers Vitaliy and Elena Vasilieva use surrealistic landscapes as the backdrop for these imaginative transformations, picturing structures like the Guggenheim in a sand-strewn context that looks like anything but modern-day Manhattan as we know it.

The New Museum is seen rising up from post-armageddon floodwaters, presumably after rising sees wash away the rest of New York City.

The Niteroi Museum is perched precariously on a mound of snow, everything else perhaps buried in the frozen wastes around it.

The Pompidou Center is set in a swirling dust storm, Paris long vanished and its inside-out appearance making it look all the more like a remnant than a finished structure.

When the dust settles, the smoke clears and the world freezes over, what if only our artistic institutions were left? From the creators of the series: “It is difficult to escape the feeling that ‘Apocalypse in Art’ really shows the world, standing on the edge, barren, falling in decay like a story line of a picture that is breaking into fragments.”