Metropolis II

I missed an installation called Metropolis II when it was here in Los Angeles at LACMA (Los Angeles County Museum of Art) a couple years ago. I took a peek at the exhibitions listings recently and was pleased to see it's back:

Chris Burden's Metropolis II is an intense kinetic sculpture, modeled after a fast paced, frenetic modern city. Steel beams form an eclectic grid interwoven with an elaborate system of 18 roadways, including one six lane freeway, and HO scale train tracks. Miniature cars speed through the city at 240 scale miles per hour; every hour, the equivalent of approximately 100,000 cars circulate through the dense network of buildings. According to Burden, "The noise, the continuous flow of the trains, and the speeding toy cars produce in the viewer the stress of living in a dynamic, active and bustling 21st century city."

Here's a short video showing the installation from some cool angles along with commentary by artist Chris Burden.

It looks really neat, though I don't agree with his idea about cars running free (they're not wild horses) and his suggestion that we'd be better off if they could travel 250 miles an hour (I hope he was being facetious). I do like his comments about modeling an urban environment that's on its way out. When he talked about the tension that comes from the constant and excessive noise of the piece, it reminded me that noise pollution and too much artificial light are apparently killing us slowly. Get earplugs and blackout curtains if you want to survive the modern world.

(via LACMA)