Slow Motion Car Crash – Art?

It’s one of the perpetual things going through the minds of car fans whenever they see a film with car stunts or an episode of Top Gear, the constant battle you have with yourself when saying ‘wow that was cool’ and ‘what a shame that car is now dead’.

I love watching cars in films but inevitably one of the awesome cars will get wrecked and a little bit of me will die inside, I can’t help it, even when I know its just a stunt car that is already ruined beyond belief or a fake prop car that has no internals and is just a shell, there is always a a part of me that will cringe a little.

I’m not one of the people who will get all angry about it and write in to complain about it and for the sake of some kind of warped entertainment I do enjoy watching massive crashes (the car chase scene is Blues Brothers is one of the best bits of film ever) but I am just saying there is a little part of me that feels sad and I’m sure I’m not the only one.

So I was in two minds as to whether a new art exhibition by a chap called Jonathan Schipper was cool or just a waste of some awesome cars. The sculpture is a machine that pushes two cars together very slowly with a lot of force over several days and this simulates a head on collision. The cars are moved so slow that it is invisible to see but they end up crushed at the front and about 3 foot in the air. The artist has said he has done it several times all over a different length of time with the quickest being three and a half days and the slowest being six whole weeks!

It is very cool to see it happen in the time lapse videos and its interesting to see how easily different bits crumple and where they crumple but I think I am looking at it from a techy POV and not an artistic one, this is what his website says about it from an artists point of view;

When we see an automobile destroyed, in a way we are looking at our own inevitable death. This moment is, because of it’s inherent speed, almost invisible. We have slowed the event via film and video but only from a cameras perspective. We never get to see the transformation of living breathing car too wreck in its entirety, in detail. This piece offers the viewer the ability to examine in three dimensions the collision of these cars. A moment that might take a fraction of a second in an actual collision will be expanded to take days.

Whether you think that is artistic genius or nonsense is up to you but I have to admit it does look really quite cool. Everything was painstakingly worked out so that the cars would be pushed together at the same force as a head on collision at 30 mph and at the very least it gives you an insight to exactly how your car will perform in a crash if you own either a ’92 Camaro or a ’88 Monte Carlo and you drive into someone.

As much as I didn’t like seeing the cars get destroyed there is also a part of me that wants to see it on a much bigger scale with vans or trucks being used, hell why not even get two massive articulated lorries and do it! The force you would need would be enormous!

To see the videos visit his site here

Now let me go and weep a little bit for the destroyed muscle cars.