Before OK Go: The History of Rube Goldberg Machines

Endless tipping points, or what today’s music hipsters can learn from 80s Swiss filmmakers.

You may have seen the new OK Go video, This Too Shall Pass, making the viral rounds this week.

And while we do love us some OK Go, we have to raise an eyebrow at all the collective gushing about how innovative the video’s approach is. Over the years we’ve seen our share of this domino-effect, object-based-chain-reaction creative execution — like this 2006 Honda commercial, or this 2007 Guinness spot from director Nicolai Fuglsig, or even Timo Arnall’s much-acclaimed Nearness project last year.

This object chain reaction is known as a Rube Goldberg machine. But where its use in visual storytelling really originated is a little-known Swiss film from 1987 by director duo Peter Fischli and David Weis, titled Der Lauf der Dinge (The Way Things Go). In it, an incredible chain reaction of common household objects — tea pots, tires, ladders, trash bags, shoes, soap — unfolds over 29 minutes and 45 seconds across 100 feet of meticulously arranged ramps, swings and surfaces.

The Way Things Go is available on DVD, which we highly recommend for experiencing this trend ancestor in its full glory and understanding its influence on a number of contemporary art trends, from urban prankstership to stop-frame animation.

And while we love seeing this historically-fueled cross-pollination of creative disciplines — film inspiring everything from physical interaction design to advertising to music videos — we also think it’s important to understand the roots and origins of things we laud as innovative today. Or else we end up with suspicious similarities.

Thanks, @claudius!

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Animation Spotlight: I AM

Deconstructing bears, or what mechanization has to do with access to language.

Today’s short-and-sweet is an abstract, poetic reflection on the dissolution of our relationship with nature amidst the man-made landscape of our urban space, courtesy of animation studio Tronic.

We find the robotic, monotonous voiceover to be a fitting vehicle for conveying the detached mechanization that has gradually replaced the organic cadence of the natural environment.

The title comes from the animals’ declaration of who they are. Each animal says, “I AM the elephant” and “I AM the horse” and it’s through language that they are reinforcing their physicality and their place in the world. And the irony, of course, is that animals don’t have access to our language, they have their own languages, but we privilege ours. And so with this piece, the idea was that by giving them access to language, it was giving them agency, giving them power, giving them the ability to be heard. ~ Vivian Rosenthal, Tronic

Read the full interview with Rosenthal on Vimeo for further insight into some of the thinking behind this beautifully executed statement piece.

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The Art of Protest

Control vs. chaos, democratic deficits, or why modernity breeds toothless anarchy.

We stumbled across The Art of Protest by filmmaker and illustrator Temujin Doran almost randomly, only to discover a cunning and insightful mini-documentary. The film makes a simple yet powerful cultural observation: Today, protests have become their own ideological antithesis. The meticulous planning, orchestration and coordination are robbing protests of their disruptive anarchism, making them appear contained and controllable in a way that completely erodes their capacity to jolt the status quo out of its plateaus.

This becomes a democratic deficit and is a self-fulfilling process. For a public unable to effect real change by acting only as spectators means they will only ever be seen as such by those in power.

A reaction to how little was accomplished by the global antiwar marches against the invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the climate discussions that took place at COP15 last December, the film offers a sober and accurate criticism of “consume and spectate activism,” exuding an urgency to revive or evolve the art of protest.

If we are ever to escape the snare of ineffectual resistance, the art of protesting needs to break free from its current condition, which blocks almost all meaningful expression and participation and allows activist organizations to become as giant and as unanswerable as the states they seek to contest.

Food for thought.

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Duelity: Earth’s Story, Split Down the Middle

Darwin vs. the General Organization of Development labs, or why truth comes in pairs.

Science and religion may be odd bedfellows, but they’ve always had a shared mechanism of propagation — both are simply the product of the stories we tell ourselves and each other to explain the world, be it rationally or emotionally or mystically. So what happens when these conflicting stories are pitted against each other? That’s exactly what Duelity does in a brilliant split-screen animation telling both sides of Earth’s story, winking at the evolution of human thought and language along the way.

Directed by filmmaker Ryan Uhrich and animator Marcos Ceravolo, Duelity is a curious hybrid of humor and philosophy, mythology and ideology, capturing the tensions and frictions inherent to our cultural storytelling.

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