For some of us, shoes are just whatever we pull onto our feet before heading out the door in the morning. For the designers at work in the Sarasota Art Museum’s just-opened exhibition, Future Now: Virtual Sneakers to Cutting-Edge Kicks, shoes, specifically sneakers, are a chance to create, innovate and explore new technologies and ways of using footwear.

The exhibit, on view through Sunday, May 4, in the museum’s third-floor galleries, features more than 70 pieces from Toronto’s Bata Shoe Museum, along with loans from other institutions and collectors, and was co-organized with the American Federation of Arts. Bata director and senior curator Elizabeth Semmelhack was on hand this past Saturday for an entertaining talk about the history, and the future, of the sneaker medium.

The Bata opened in 1995. It was a dream of Sonja Bata, whose husband, Thomas, a Czech-Canadian businessman, ran the Bata Shoe Company his father founded from the 1940s to the 1980s. An avid collector, Sonja gifted the shoes she found on her world travels to the museum. The current exhibit traces some of the history of what we now call the sneaker, including the first use of rubber in the footwear, but it mainly focuses, as its title suggests, on what forward-thinking designers are working on today.

“I see innovations that might take decades to come to fruition,” Semmelhack said while describing and presenting images of eye-popping examples in the works. That might range from latter-day interpretations of the auto-lacing shoes Michael J. Fox wore as Marty McFly in the film Back to the Future Part II (a prop for the movie, but an off-camera experiment as well) to Adidas' 1986 Micropacer, which had a small screen telling runners the distance they had covered, and Converse All-Stars made with an innovative knitting technique to cut down on waste.

Sustainability is a big issue as designers work with ever-changing technology, Semmelhack said. Some designers, like the pioneering lab Scry, are working to make the process of 3D-printing footwear more practical. Other companies, meanwhile, are working with mushroom spores to replace leather while still offering the breathability that leather provides. There are also designs aimed at aiding those with mobility issues, inflatable shoes that conform to the individual foot in ways that laces can’t and boots created with stabilizers to help train people who work in potentially dangerous situations, like on oil rigs.

A lot of information on the tools and technology involved is provided in the exhibition labels in the galleries, and it’s worth taking the time to peruse them carefully. But Future Now’s shoes are also just cool to look at from an aesthetic angle—even if you suspect you may never don any of them yourself.

Future Now: Virtual Sneakers to Cutting-Edge Kicks is on display through Sunday, May 4, at Sarasota Art Museum, 1001 S. Tamiami Trail, Sarasota. For more information, call (941) 309-4300 or visit sarasotaartmuseum.org.