“A surreal, moving garden of repurposed photographic equipment.” (Image by Adam E. Moreira.)

Rust never sleeps, so it takes diligence to stave off decay–a decay that would set in rapidly if we were to ever disappear. In a dense city, the infrastructure is particularly fraught. One way New York monitors its mass transportation is with a Geometry Car. From Bldg Blog:

“it’s hard not to be captivated by the idea of some blindingly well-lit behemoth vehicle maneuvering around beneath the city at night, all lasers, mirrors, lenses, and prisms—a surreal, moving garden of repurposed photographic equipment and motion-capture technologies from different historical eras—scanning the geometry of the metropolis from below, down to thermal flaws in the very metal it passes over. Surrounded by overlapping holographs of infinite lines and tunnels, like the subway dreaming of itself, this collage of physical instruments circles around and around through the foundation of the world, a two-track mind, a mobile neurology thinking in well-measured bursts of strobe light.”