[Video Link] Henry Joost & Ariel Schulman (Catfish directors) made this terrific short documentary about Metropolis II, Chris Burden's incredible kinetic sculpture, a 20' x 30' model city with 1,200 Matchbox-type cars running at 200 scale mph. It took four years to make and will open at the Los Angeles Country Museum of Art (LACMA) in Fall 2011.
Below, a photo of co-director Ariel Schulman:
/
/
4:41 pm Tue
Aug 2, 2011
Kinetic sculpture with 1,200 Matchbox-type cars
What if school was out, forever?
Today a future without schools. Instead of gathering students into a room and teaching them, everybody learns on their own time, on tablets and guided by artificial intelligence. Flash Forward: RSS | iTunes | Twitter | Facebook | Web | Patreon | RedditIn this episode we talk to a computer scientist who developed an artificially […]
READ THE REST
Lament for the hard drive
Where are our petabyte drives? Brian Hayes takes us through the reasons storage is “stuck” in the low terabytes. The tl;dr is that we got such exceptional capacity growth in the late 90s and early 00s we don’t need much more right now, so the focus since then has been on SSDs, networking, interfaces, etc, […]
READ THE REST
Squarespace staffer claims exec told them "you’re so black, you blend into the chair"
Amélie Lamont, a former staffer at website-hosting startup Squarespace, writes that she often found herself disregarded and disrespected by her colleagues. One comment in particular, though, set her reeling — and came to exemplify her experiences there.
READ THE REST
Don’t be that friend at the music festival—be the festival mom with this survival kit instead
You won’t want to hit another music festival without these essentials. Read on to find out what we’re packing for the final festivals of the year.This Smart Charger Always Knows Where The Car Is ParkedIn addition to charging your phone, the Zus Smart Car Charger and Locator ($29.99) helps you locate your car no matter […]
READ THE REST
Even Cheech and Chong would be impressed with this “Happy Kit”
When the mood strikes you and you’re looking to light up, you shouldn’t have to hunt around for all the things you need: your pipe, your grinder, your favorite munchies, and so on. And with the Happy Kit, you won’t have to.This compact black case houses everything you need, including a grinder, a glass pipe, […]
READ THE REST
Kiss your boring job goodbye—you’re about to learn how to program
Everybody knows that if you want to earn the big bucks these days, you need to learn how to code. Luckily, you don’t even need to spend thousands on grad school to make coding your career. The Entry-Level Python & JavaScript Programming Bundle is the easiest way to get started in programming in two of […]
READ THE REST
21
Comments are closed.
Joost & Schulman? That doesn’t make any sense for them. After all, Metropolis II is both cool and not a hoax.
Aw, I want to see a video taken from the car’s perspective!
Then watch the whole video :P
That’s from the trains perspective, not the car. That’s where I got the idea. :)
There’s one from one of the train’s perspective at the end of the film.
How cool is this? Every kid’s dream and I’m sure housecat-approved.
I wonder is there is a lubricant applied to the axles? Will the Matchbox car wear out and need to be replaced? Did he consult with engineers at Mattel? Was this build on site over 4 years and if not what a nightmare of logistics of moving and reassembling this will be? Are the cars placed randomly or is there a cryptic message in their placement? Is the message in colors or the models? What does it mean?!
*head explosion*
The city of the future is supposed to feature _faster_ cars? Here I was thinking that what large cities really need is more intelligent planning i.e. better infrastructure for bikers and pedestrians, not a way to keep motorized vehicles on the roads. But then I haven’t invested four years of my life building a toy, so I guess I’m a bit biased.
Oh, I want to be tiny enough to get behind the wheel!
Just go to and drive in LA and you will feel like you are….
Which would also make it possible for you to visit The Derek Zoolander Center For Kids Who Can’t Read Good And Wanna Learn To Do Other Stuff Good Too.
I love Chris Burden and I can’t wait to take my kid to see this. And Tortoise and Mahogany were excellent choices for the soundtrack.
I like Burden, but his 1999 piece “Airplane factory” promised a lot, a machine making and launching rubber-band powered planes into the Tate Britain gallery, and never worked. It also cost the Tate £500k ($814k). Disappointment isn’t the word for it.
Sometimes good art is risky
jeez, my two year old son is LOVING this…
Hopefully, some visitor will slip a VW beetle with a dude nailed to it into the mix.
OK, not being a “hatah.” I love the concept and I love what he’s created. However:
That music drove me crazy.
The unending “artistic” super zoomed-in shots drove me crazy. You have to wait till the very end
to actually see _what_ it is.
I see what you did there….
Those were the elements that kept me engaged throughout this little short. Are people so “speeded-up” and ADD these days that any semblance of patience is gone forever?
Wow, and someone actually used a “tripod” (look it up) with a fluid head (look that up, too) instead of the crass shaky-cam-passing-itself-off-as-an “immediacy-intimate” tactic. Once one puts down the iText machine for 5 minutes and immerses oneself into the small reveals, graduating music, to the dramatic, final reveal of how vast this sculpture is, it’s quite satisfying. Kudos to all involved!
The Kinetic City. Won’t you be my neighbor?”
I can’t wait to see this in the fall. Amazing! I loved the overhead shot. Hopefully, they’ll have the video next to the exhibit, so you can get the first person view of the train (and yeah, it would be cool if they could get a first person view of a car).
I loved Matchbox cars. They were better than Hot Wheels — my opinion. They rolled better. I recognized, in the close-ups, some of the ones I had when I was a kid.
I liked the music, but was waiting for them to play some Phillip Glass.