Metropolis II / Chris Burden

Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA)
5905 Wilshire Blvd
Los Angeles, CA 90036

Chris Burden‘s latest kinetic sculpture, “Metropolis II,” does more than just imitate life. The colorful display of roads, cars, trains and buildings is art imitating what the artist foresees life being like in five or 10 years.

It will be a time, Burden forecasts, when cars will race across Los Angeles’ no-longer-gridlocked freeways and streets, past a skyline of towering buildings and single-family homes, at speeds of 240 miles per hour or more.

That’s just what the tiny cars do in “Metropolis II,” a colorful contraption composed of 1,100 miniature vehicles, 18 miniature roads, a tiny commuter rail line and dozens of small skyscrapers and other buildings. The cars, which Burden says reach a speed of “240 scale miles per hour,” are powered by a complex series of electronic conveyor belts and magnets,

“In essence, it’s sort of a complicated roller-coaster system,” the artist, one of the pioneers of the Light and Space movement that flowered in Los Angeles in the 1970s, explained after throwing the switch on it earlier this week.

via: CBS News

Photography by: Taiyo Watanabe