Some months ago HEMA launched a highly viral animation.
A great idea - and beautifully executed by the FlashFabriek at Satama - that has attracted a lot of people to the redesigned site of the HEMA. For non-Dutch readers: this is the department store where 90% of the Dutch population shops. I was member of the small team at Lost Boys that created the redesign of the online HEMA shop that went live summer 2007. As the shop feels (partly) mine, I wished I had created that viral as well!
This animation comes with a tradition.
Firstly it brings to mind the 2003 Honda Cog commercial for the Honda Accord.
(for better quality see the high res QuickTime movie)
This kind of cause and effect is called a Rube Goldberg machine, named after the famous American cartoonist that created complex devices that perform simple tasks in indirect, convoluted ways (Wikipedia entry).
Of course the goal of these contraptions is the ingenuity of the chains. It is a world in itself where ordinary things and sudden relationships between things become carrier of creative findings. A loftier goal than the - somewhat related - Domino Day championships.
Since 2002 the Japanse television show PythagoraSwitch for young children shows short Rube Goldberg type videos to show world phenomena.
But the creative team of Wieden and Kennedy UK must have been inspired by much earlier work. The setting of the commercial, a museum floor and walls, gives away the reference to art.
In 1987 the Swiss artist duo Peter Fischli and David Weiss created the video Der Lauf der Dinge (The Way Things Go). It is a 30 minutes video showing a long chain reaction, but without any clear purpose - the film just ends. It has a definite roughness, as the setting is not a museum but an old industrial hall, and fire, steam and fluids play a prominent role.
From the Wikipedia entry:
The film evolved out of work the artists did on their earlier photography series, "Quiet afternoon," (German: Stiller Nachmittag) of 1984-1985. As the delicately unstable assemblages they constructed for the photos were apt to almost immediately collapse, they decided that they wanted to make use of this energy.
Looking at the fragment, the aesthetics of the Honda commercial are far away. One only has to view the start with the rotating garbage bag. This is a commercial, and these are other times. The commercial has been inspired by, not based on the art movie. Still, according to Wikipedia, Wieden and Kennedy eventually admitted to copying a sequence of weighted tires rolling uphill. Was that meant to be another hint to their inspirers?
"The Way Things Go" is available from Amazon.
