A car in London found itself in an unusual parking space: upside-down in a gravity-defying installation outside Southbank Center. No, it's not a natural disaster, aliens at work, or an act of vandalism, but the engineering of Alex Chinneck's latest public artwork, Pick yourself up and pull yourself together. Chinneck's follow up to his floating building in Convent Gardens brought together a team of engineers and road workers, organized in cooperation with Vauxhall Motors, to curl a single parking space backwards into the air while continuing to support its one-tonne automobile occupant.
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Like Richard Ankrom's fake street sign, Chinneck and his team put meticulous details into the sculpture to ensure that it followed all the protocols of both street safety and road readiness, though why anyone in a levitating sedan would need road markers to be kept safe, we'll never know.“With an effortlessly curling road I hoped to transcend the material nature of tarmac and stone, giving these typically inflexible materials an apparent fluidity," Chinneck says in a press release. "While I am most excited by the hidden engineering and complex manipulation of concealed steel, others will simply enjoy the accessible theatricality of the illusion at play."
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