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Portrait of a Future City: 100,000 Tiny Cars Going 240 Miles Per Hour

At the LACMA, Chris Burden's "Metropolis II" anticipates an elegant, driverless, noisey future.

It’s a pretty sly joke that this video of Metropolis II, a “kinetic sculpture” that’s characterized by its high speed, should be soundtracked by a band called Tortoise.

The music is a pretty inspired choice though—whether by Supermarché who made the video or by Metropolis II’s artist Chris Burden—as Tortoise’s music can evoke their native Chicago at its most frenetic; a city not only bisected but trisected by interstates, its trains running up on the second-story level, as if to ensure that their rattling and screeching carries as far as possible.

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Likewise, Burden’s Metropolis II is modeled after “a fast paced, frenetic modern city,” but hearing Burden talk about it, it’s about the next city, really. In the video, he waxes on the days of free-driving cars drawing to a close—and he seems pretty pumped about it. In this piece, the miniature cars are speed through the steel-beam cityscape at 240 scale miles per hour. “That makes me very hopeful for the future,” he laughs. “That’s about the speed they should be running.” It's a distinctly 21st century place.

There’s no mistaking Burden’s work with, say, Giacomo Balla’s futurist paintings, but it’s almost a perfect echo of Balla’s and his contemporaries’ themes. One century later, art is back to Abstract Speed + Sound—although the abstraction has been replaced with literal speed and literal sound. But when I watch Burden's piece, it feels like the resolution of a theme started by the futurists rather than a continuation.

In the Futurist Manifesto, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti praised the cutting edge of technology: "The splendor of the world has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing automobile with its bonnet adorned with great tubes like serpents with explosive breath … a roaring motor car which seems to run on machine-gun fire, is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace."

Here a hundred years later, the future of the car is still sleek beauty, and one hopes more speed, but with less roar, less explosive breath and less machine gun fire. The dream of driverless cars is tied to the dream of safer roads. If the first street-legal autonomous vehicle is any indication, the safe roads will be populated by long-overdue electric car. Literal speed, and the car has passed.

Metropolis II has been on display at the Los Angeles Museum of Art since 2011, but Burden has been building it continuously for four years. He says its getting close to finished, apparently having internalized that slow and steady wins the race.