The plot of the movie ‘Inception’ is almost an afterthought compared to the impact that its distorted, dreamlike manipulations of architecture and landscapes has had on a generation of artists and designers. Inspired by the concept of warping a scene in ways that completely defy the laws of physics yet still remain photo-realistic, the following artists have created new worlds that are strange and yet also familiar.

Erik Johansson

Nothing is quite as it seems in the images produced by Swedish-born, Berlin-based photo artist Erik Johansson. Grassy land cascades over the edge of the world like a waterfall, the surface of the earth is unzipped, cars appear to hover upside-down on the road. It’s difficult to tell reality from illusion, and that’s the point; the scenes he creates are as playful as they are impossible. Setting up and taking the photos takes about as long as manipulating them in Photoshop, and a single image can consist of over 100 layers.

Cubic Landscape by Petey Ulatan

Flattened views of landscapes are flipped and folded to create cubes, their edges bent at 90 degree angles, eliminating the very gradual and subtle curves that make up the surface of the Earth. Artist Petey Ulatan takes inspiration from the films ‘Inception’ and ‘Interstellar’ to reshape the world, almost as if a giant hand were making it into origami.

Turkey Turned Upside-Down by Aydin Büyüktas

Many of the same manipulations are happening in the work of Aydin Büyüktas, except focused on the Turkish city of Istanbul, with all of its landmarks and neighborhoods warped in ways that defy the laws of physics. The artist uses drone photography and 3D software to create these composite images. “We live in places that most of the times don’t draw our attention, places that transform our memories, places that the artist gives another dimension; where the perceptions that generally crosses our minds will be demolished and new ones will arise. These works aims to leave the viewer alone with a surprising visuality ironic as well, multidimensional romantic point of view.”

‘Inception Park’ in Buenos Aires by Black Sheep Films

What if you could ride a trackless rollercoaster around the city, almost as if you’re on the back of some kind of mystical flying creature? Black Sheep Films gives us an idea of what this would feel like with ‘Inception Park,’ a strange little video set in Buenos Aires. It’s fun to watch the snake of rollercoaster cars meander through the space, interacting with architecture.

Twisted Architecture by Nicholas Kennedy Sitton

“These photos are a result of how intriguing the concept of distortion translates to architecture,” says artist Nicholas Kennedy Sitton of his ‘Twisted Architecture’ series. “It creates a sense of falling into itself, like capturing a moment of demolition. I can destroy titanous steel structures with the click of a mouse and create new twisted versions of reality. I was also inspired by San Francisco. I had just moved there and being in a new city was disorienting and exciting and I wanted to capture how my whole world had changed.”

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Warped Worlds 30 Surreal Digitally Manipulated Landscapes

Lumps of modeling clay in shades that match human flesh are globbed into the hollows of what should be faces in this series of portraits mixing photography with sculpture. Artist José Cardoso gets under the viewer’s skin with visuals that disturb and fascinate, perhaps prompting some to reach up and ensure that their own faces are still intact after checking out the entire collection.

Warped and distorted, with ragged edges, holes from poking fingers and glimpses of bone-like foreign objects embedded within, the Play-Doh takes the place of ordinary features, completely obscuring them or making it seem as if some careless child’s hand has ripped them away. There’s no hint of an attempt at modeling an actual representation of a face – just lumps. (The ones with bits of hair and dirt in the dough are especially cringe-worthy.)

The series is deliberately reminiscent of the special effects in old school horror movies, especially those of David Cronenberg, and it’s easy to see that influence here. As scary as they may have been at the time, when we look back at films like Naked Lunch, The Fly, Videodrome and Shivers we can see that they clearly made use of a whole lo to rubber and clay to achieve those gory effects. In comparison, Cardoso’s work is quite restrained, but its subtlety is startlingly effective.

A floor is a ceiling, a lake is made of shattered glass, carpets of grass cascade over the edge of the world and buildings sprout wheels and wander away in the fantastically surreal world of Erik Johansson. The photographer has spent much of the last decade refining his reality-bending image manipulation techniques, combining dozens of real photos to create effects that are often hyperrealistic yet physically impossible. As unlikely as it may seem, Johansson uses no CGI, stock photos or digital illustrations in his work – each image is a complex collage of his own photographs, captured on his Hasselblad HD5-40 camera.

On his YouTube channel, the artist offers behind-the-scenes videos for many of his works so we can see just how each one is assembled. For his newest piece, ‘Impact,’ Johansson carefully cut four massive mirrors into fragments, arranged them in a field and photographed his model standing among them in a kayak. Photos from this shoot are ultimately blended with images of a lake and additional studio photos of cracked mirror shards.

Depicting just about every step the artist takes during the process, the videos are just as impressive as the final images and make it clear that the arduous process requires many hours of retouching. Johansson even leaves in the parts where he experiments with various effects and ideas that don’t make it to the final version.

As he explains on his website, Johansson is interested in capturing ideas rather than moments, but with the goal of making each one look as realistic as possible, saying “The only thing that limits us is our imagination.”

Unbound by gravity, the need for structural soundness or any sense of real-world aesthetics, architecture becomes like a life form of its own, multiplying and mutating in strange and unsettling ways. These fictional architectural assemblages explore unlikely configurations that are only possible with digital art and photo manipulation.

Surreal Structures by Matthias Jung

The architectural creations of Matthias Jung seem to inhabit a fairytale realm where gravity doesn’t apply, raising Brutalist concrete structures on tiny stilts, floating stained glass windows like balloons and untethering some from the earth altogether. Some designs, however, seem like they might actually occupy some hidden rural meadow in Europe where aging country homes are actually topped with sheep-dotted hills. Jung is a German-based graphic designer who refers to his strange photo collages as “architectural short poems.”

Fictional Architecture by Victor Enrich

Victor Enrich’s ‘architecture gone wild‘ twists, bends and turns, splitting down the middle as if the buildings are being unzipped or seeming to disassemble before our eyes. Balconies become giant slides leading down to the street, staircases meander off into the sky and individual apartments stretch out of their building toward the sun like leaves on a plant. The Barcelona-born designer travels the world and takes photographs of cities, digitally manipulating them for results that would generally be impossible in the real world.

“Once the object is chosen, it is shot from a point easy to recognize by users, not pretending to achieve the greatest picture ever, but instead, a picture that anybody could do. The shot is the basis to produce a replica of the building by using very detailed photogrammetric techniques that end with the creation of a three-dimensional model that fits almost perfectly into the picture.”

Jim Kazanjian

Shadowy passages and strange interiors from horror films like The Shining and the fiction of H.P. Lovecraft tinge the disorienting and disquieting work of Portland-based photographer Jim Kazanjian, who’s inspired by “our inherent anxieties about isolation and vulnerability.” Kazanjian draws on his experience as a CGI artist working on games to create these ‘hyper-collages,’ cobbling together images of buildings, sinkholes and foggy landscapes from an archive of over 30,000 photos.

“My interest in gaming stems from my fascination with architecture and its potential to generate narrative structures,” says the artist. “My time in game development has definitely informed my photographic work. I find that the immersive qualities in both mediums have a strong correlation.”

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Architectural Fiction 35 Surreal Fantasy Structures

Some of the world’s greatest abstract artists have created portraits of humans that, while inspired by the human form, have completely dispensed with any actual human’s natural proportions.

Hungarian artist Flora Borsi decided to take some of those abstract paintings and digitally create what the models would look like if the paintings were realistic depictions of real humans.

The results are equal parts entertaining and disturbing. Elongated necks, exaggerated facial features, and impossible proportions make the subjects look vaguely human but not quite what we would expect from actual human models standing next to the portraits they inspired.

The paintings of Modigliani, Picasso, Malevich and more are given the unusual treatment of working backwards to create something new from an already-existing piece of art.

Entitled “The Real Life Models,” the project is one that takes you a bit by surprise. Seeing these human forms outside of their respective paintings only highlights how creative and liberal the artists were in painting the original pieces.

Borsi did include in her series one real historic photo of models next to the painting they inspired. The older couple who actually posed for Grant Wood’s “American Gothic” are pictured next to their own portrait, looking nearly as sullen as they do in the painting.