On 'The way things go'

''When I first saw Der Lauf der Dinge in Kassel, it had given me a quite regressive delight in

seeing things enchain, knock-on and interact with each other, in a sheer endless, self gener-

ated and self-propelled but carefully crafted, staged sequence, whose anxiously anticipated

increments of disasters, collapses, explosions and conflagrations were matched by the in-

finite patience and delicacy with which each mini-event was thought up and set up, each

one enacting often quite literally a precarious balance, in which the possibility of failure is

palpably and positively inscribed''.

''But there is another way to view and describe the Fischli & Weiss’ installation, which

takes it out of art-history and the avant-garde context, and instead, brings it closer to the

world of technology, physics (gravity), chemistry (chemical reaction) and even evolution-

ary biology. Its obsession with principles of concatenation and repetition, of controlled

contingency and simple processes leading to complex effects, its invocation of the four

elements and their micro- as well as macro- scale interactions not only give us a ‘scien-

tific’ view on the world, but one inflected by ‘chaos-theory’: leading at one end to ‘emer-

gence’, and at the other, progressing inexorably in the direction of entropy, the irreversible

winding down of heat and energy. Its meta-mechanics are thus intimately related to our

second concern: that of the perceived need to redefine what we understand by life: the

new ‘life forms’ and the new ‘life-sciences’. At the same time, the overarching principle –

be it cybernetic, ecological, or aesthetic – organizing the series into a flow of continuous

interruptions is that of the ‘tipping point’, a metaphor for sudden change first introduced

by Morton Grodzins in 1960, then used by sociologists, such as Thomas Schelling (for

explaining demographic changes in mixed-race neighbourhoods), before becoming more

generally familiar in urbanist studies (used by Saskia Sassen, for instance, in her analysis

of global cities), and finally popularized by mass-psychologists and trend-analysts such

as Malcolm Gladwell, in his best-seller by that name.''

Thomas Elsaesser, Constructive Instability or The life of things as the cinema's afterlife?

(Link: http://dare.uva.nl/document/138294)