After 10 months, it finally rained in Los Angeles. Of course, we caught the heaviest downpours during the 300 meters that separated us from the entrance of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. It's the largest art museum in the West and famous for the iconic lights by artist Chris Burden placed outside.

It's also the last of the great LA museums we had yet to visit. Thanks to the rain and Lorenzo's advice, who visited when he came to see us in early January, we decided today was the right day.

The first two floors are dedicated to the exhibition Digital Witness: Revolutions in Design, Photography, and Film. It examines the impact of digital manipulation tools from the 1980s to the present, for the first time assessing simultaneous developments and debates in the fields of photography, graphic design, and visual effects. Featuring over 150 works, the exhibition traces the emergence of distinctive digital aesthetic strategies, relationships to realism, and storytelling modes.

Delightful. A treasure for someone like me, who loves the intersection of technology, communication, and humanities. Among the works that struck me the most is certainly Metropolis II again by Chris Burden:

Metropolis II represents an entire urban complex, which could be Los Angeles or any twenty-first-century city.

Burden created its predecessor, Metropolis I, seven years before embarking on Metropolis II. The earlier work featured eighty Hot Wheels cars zooming around a model city on single-lane roadways. For Metropolis II, he ventured something on a much grander scale. With a team of eight studio assistants, he began working on the piece in 2006.

It includes eleven hundred custom-designed cars, eighteen highways, and a variety of architectural structures made of wood, glass, natural stone tiles, and other materials.

The artist estimated that every hour, one hundred thousand cars circulate through Metropolis Il, making it very much like a miniature Los Angeles.

Going up to the second floor, part of the exhibition is dedicated to technological design, with the first Macintosh or the first copies of Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop on display. Here, advancing through the halls, I couldn't help but linger on this collection of Amigas on which Andy Warhol decided to create art:

Pop artist Andy Warhol, always interested in technologies of replication, responded eagerly when Commodore International asked him to endorse the Amiga 1000 home computer in 1985. The launch took place at Lincoln Center and featured Warhol using a bitmap drawing application to create a portrait of singer Debbie Harry. Warhol went on to make other drawings and a short film on the Amiga, which came with a camera, drawing pad, and various software programs.

Finally, speaking of art, technology, and communication, I couldn't help but focus on this IBM advertisement and compare it with Magritte's work (located at the 3rd floor), finding similarities in meaning that were all too evident.

I did really enjoy LACMA. It's an amazing experience and can't wait to see what it's incoming this next April!