As Cosmology Unfolds onto City Space: Blu’s ‘Big Bang Big Boom’

When graffiti artist and experimental stop-motion animator Blu claimed his wall-painted video short, MUTO, was just a test for a larger, more thoughtful narrative, I didn’t quite know what to expect. His MUTO project was already decidedly impressive — the Italian (Maybe? The artist’s terrestrial positioning is somewhat cloaked in mystery, just like another iconoclastic vandal from the UK) artist used a camera to make his graffiti evolve in time through a frantic succession of images. Fantastical creatures emerged from floating blobs of paint; they traveled across the city walls and streets in a fluttering movement, and found their end in surprising turns of events.

In “BIG BANG BIG BOOM”, yes all caps, Blu offers his most decisive work thus far. It’s a mythological tale, seemingly lighthearted and playful, but bound together with a strong sense of caution and compassion. It’s a story of our cosmological origins, the evolution of the planet earth, and our likely end, plastered onto the surfaces of city space and then embedded in code onto the digital stratosphere, glowing electric like a Homeric fire pit, where lyrical stories of human folly and inevitable subjection to divine forces are still shared.