Mar
04
2014
0

A Kinetic Sculpture That Circulates 100,000 Miniature Cars Every Hour

metropolis
Talk about having too much time on your hands. This thing circulates 100,000 toy cars every hour through a vast network of 18 tracks. The creator Chris Burden calls it an artwork, although I think he might be putting a bit too much meaning into his toycar track, it’s pretty cool.
To get an idea of just how big it is, look at the picture, there’s a person standing in the middle of it.
You can see it on exhibition at the Los Angeles Museum of Art, or in the video below.

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.”