When art meets engineering
The GIFs above show Metropolis II, a kinetic sculpture of the modern bustling city. The project — by artist Chris Burden — took nearly four years to create and features 1,100 cars zipping around 18 roadways, including one six-laner. “The noise and level of activity are both mesmerizing and anxiety provoking,” he explains.
Burden has created a number of large-scale installations that walk the line between engineering and sculpture:
As an art-school graduate student at the University of California, Irvine, his friends were physics students who played around in the lab the way he experimented and daydreamed in his studio. “They’d say, ‘We follow our hunches, we freeze things to 300 degrees below zero and then we hit them with hammers,’ ” he recalled. “I thought, ‘Wow, that’s kind of what I do.’”
His retrospective show, Extreme Measures at The New Museum, is showing through January 12th, 2014.
FWIW, I make a trip to see Metropolis II every time I visit Los Angeles. Between Chris Burden at the New Museum and Chris Wool coming to the Guggenheim it’s like NEW YORK CITY FINALLY GOT SOME CULTURE. About time.