One man in particular has shaped how we represent the future. At once immensely familiar and perfectly unknown, painter and engineer Syd Mead is an unavoidable part of American culture.

On the New Yorker blog, Sasha Frere-Jones plots a trajectory from Kurt Schwitters’ Merzbau to Japanese noise musician Merzbow to Justin Bieber. The connection? Machines.

A celebration of the Buchla 200e, the Bugatti of modular analog synthesizers.