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The Way Things Go

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AA0mFjJbNH8

This entry was posted on Monday, February 18th, 2008 at 2:40 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

5 Responses to “The Way Things Go”

  1. Kaitlyn Says:
    February 19th, 2008 at 6:49 pm

    I am still amazed at how incredible this whole….contraption works! I know from a past project how hard it is just to make things move but here the whole chemical aspect was involved too and therefore they had to have just the right amount to set it off. I was going to say that I think it would be interesting for someone to actually build all the sketches that were done for these sorts of things but then I remember learning that the drawings wouldn’t actually work in real life…too bad.

  2. archress Says:
    February 20th, 2008 at 12:53 am

    In watching this video I kept thinking of the machine in Back to the Future that makes breakfast and feeds the dog. And then when I looked up The Way things Go, Rube Goldberg’s name came up. And sure enough, Goldberg’s illustrations have influenced art and popular culture in the making of all these complicated machines that do simple tasks. There is even a Rube Goldberg machine design contest.
    Watching the chain reactions in the video was really mesmerizing, but it went on for so long that I was just waiting for it to end. But it was more like the camera stopped filming rather that the contraption coming to an end. I think that at any number of points if they had stopped it, I would have been just as impressed, but that probably would defeat the point of the whole event. I wonder how many trials they had to do before they were able to get it all to go off perfectly? I’m reminded of a clip I saw of a huge domino set up going down, and it got pretty far, but I think there were some dominoes missing and it failed going into the world records. It only takes a little mistake to ruin the whole thing.

  3. roblog Says:
    February 20th, 2008 at 10:46 am

    I remember seeing this or something eerily similar to this at the Hirschhorn last year. It was on a video monitor stuck in a narrow hallway with two tiny benches and it just sucked people in. It was a quiet day in the building but the hallway was mobbed. People watched it again and again and again and there was never a place to sit. People were standing or lined up on the walls.

    I’ve always loved Rube Goldberg drawings but making contraptions based on only partially predictable events is infuriating–remember the game Mousetrap? I had friends who had it and it never quite worked like the commercials…

  4. casey Says:
    February 20th, 2008 at 1:17 pm

    I have been talking about the video since we watched it in class. The amount of time and number of trials it must have taken to perfect had to have been outrageous. I, like Robert, was reminded of the game Mousetrap, which I had as a kid. I never remember playing the game like it was supposed to be played, but always set it off to watch the series of events. I was entrances by Fischli and Weiss’ work, at times I was on the edge of my seat trying to figure out what could possibly happen next, but most of the time I was no where near being right. What really impressed me was the length of the chain of events, and the length of the video. Normally, I have trouble sitting still, but I found that I couldn’t look away for more than a second, I was so interested in what could happen next.

  5. Eleanor Johnstone Says:
    February 29th, 2008 at 8:30 pm

    I thought that this was wonderfully assembled and produced. I’m kinda fascinated with older machinery in the first place, and these days people are so hung up on speed and shiny objects and how impressively efficient something can be that I tend to be much more excited by the use of older items in contemporary art/work. I found that I wasn’t waiting for the process to finish, but rather that every movement was distinct to an extent and that I was just enjoying seeing items that wouldn’t necessarily be trusted in the machinery of this day and age but that were totally and uniquely functional. I wonder, though: if our society weren’t so technologically advanced and distanced from this contraption, would this be as significant?

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