Friday Fact: The Snowball Effect

When you feel like what you do doesn’t make a difference in the world, just watch “The Way Things Go”  and you’ll feel a lot better.

The first time I saw this was in my sculpture class.  The video starts out with a close shot of a spinning garbage bag with a tire beside it.  At first you’re intrigued, but after about a minute and half of watching it, you start to get pretty impatient.  Then you notice that the bag has slowly been getting lower and lower as its ties unwind.  Eventually it starts to brush the tire, softly at first, then hard enough to make the tire start to roll.  Thus begins a 30 minute long series of chain reactions involving rockets, candle cars, fire, and absolutely genius use of the effects of gravity.  The artists weight tires to make them roll even uphill.  They use chemical reactions to power wooden cars, to light fuses, to cause incredible pyrotechnic effects, and one of my personal favorites, to make a flaming tetherball.  They figured out angles and triangulation of things to perfection.

According to the two artists who did it, Peter Fischli and David Weiss, there were no cuts.  The movie is shot straight through.  There are no breaks in the action, except for minor ones where fires took really long times to do what they were going to do.  It’s fun to watch it with a group, because every person has their mouth agape in amazement and captivation.  It is utterly intriguing, all thirty minutes of it.  I’m sure it was a heck of an sculpture to set up. 

You can watch about four and half minutes of it here at YouTube.  Here is a shorter clip of a different part of it, also from YouTube, that shows the incredible walking shoes.  Better yet, you could rent the whole thing.