'Netropolis' by Michael Najjar

The “netropolis” artworks deal with the future urban development of global megacities and the myriad challenges such development brings. Just as Fritz Lang built his 1927 film ""Metropolis"" on the eponymous 1921 photo-collage of the Bauhaus artist Paul Citroen, Najjar's ""netropolis"" works take Lang's vision of a futuristic city and place it in the 21st century. The panoramic view of ""netropolis"" changes the reality of how urban space is constructed into a landscape. This landscape itself is changed by the digital fusion of multiple points of view into an abstract multi-layered mesh of relationships. The distant view of the city inverts the close-up perception and connects structures unseen from a closer viewpoint. The ""netropolis"" pictures are metaphors for the compression of space and time, and the high degree of global interconnectivity which is a hallmark of our contemporary world.