Category Archives: Aesthetics

Video: “The Way Things Go” – Rube Goldbergian Pyro-Performance

By Vijay Mathew | Published: February 26, 2012
There’s nothing more theatrical than fire in a Rube Goldberg machine. The fire makes the spectacle and the hypnotism, the Rube Goldberg chain-reactions create the suspense and absurdity, and the timing of the camera movement makes the virtuosity. This video is a 3 minute excerpt of the 30 minute Fischli and Weiss performance project from 1988 [...]
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Making a Performance of a City – RaspouTeam

By Vijay Mathew | Published: February 11, 2012
Check out this theatre form: RaspouTeam is a street art collective and their project called “Paris, Désordres Publics” embeds histories of public disorder, revolutions, dissent in their real geographic locations across the entire city. The audience interface would be their own mobile phones that decode QR codes on ceramic tiles that have been illegally glued [...]
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The Rube Goldberg Machine & “the Effort-to-Impact Ratio”

By Vijay Mathew | Published: January 27, 2012
This exquisite 120 second commercial was made for Honda by Wieden+Kennedy in 2003. This throws my whole pseudo-scientific “effort-to-impact ratio” under the bridge. The production took 6 months and cost almost two million U.S. dollars. So on a scale from 1-10 for “effort”, it’s a 10. And on a scale from 1-10 for “impact”, it’s [...]
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What do Rube Goldberg Machines and Theatre have in common:

By Vijay Mathew | Published: January 11, 2012
They are both huge, complicated, convoluted, seemingly pointless contraptions that are meant to engage an audience.  :) And this video of a Rube Goldberg machine does it brilliantly, and is wildly theatrical in terms of spectacle and how it uses time: sustained suspense and the virtuosic coordination of the performers, music, and camerawork -
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