exhibitions artists about contact
"Mutropolis"
(in the South Gallery) Charles Huntley Nelson

September 9th – October 8th, 2006
Opening Reception: Saturday September 9th, 2006, 7-10 pm

Mutropolis is a video Mash-Up of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis and Gualtiero Jacopetti & Franco Prosperi’s film Goodbye Uncle Tom. Metropolis, the 1926 movie that envisioned a mad scientist replacing humans with robot clones, is a perfect indicator of issues of race, class, gender and futurism. The ideas of a downtrodden underclass working beneath the city and robots as slaves are abstractions of the black experience. By using images from the films Goodbye Uncle Tom and Amistad as an overlay on Metropolis, this brings home the similarities between working class people used as machines to build great civilizations. Since Metropolis was created as a silent film with a classical score, the music conveyed the emotions of the characters and foreshadowed elements of the plot. This is now achieved through a new soundtrack using drum & bass and dub reggae which are contemporary examples of African inspired mechanical music. This piece is an attempt to reclaim the idea of the future as something that is ever changing. Through the representation of various visions of the future combined with images of the past, it is an effort to visualize the term Afrofuturism.