The Way Things Do

In 1987, the Swiss artists Peter Fischli and David Weiss presented their film 'Der Lauf der Dinge', known internationally as 'The Way Things Go'. The film shows the chain reaction of a long sequence of objects and substances that activate and connect with each other, as if they were predetermined by a continuous cause-and-effect relationship. The sequence, that appears to be arbitrary and chaotic, is actually meticulously choreographed. The 1980s were also the decade when Daniel Jacoby & Yu Araki, Serafín Álvarez and Cécile B. Evans were born; to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the Swiss duo's film, these artists have used the piece as a basis for new creations. 'The Way Things Do' offers a perspective from which the artists explore the notion of the object as an independent, complex, inexhaustible reality. Their works reveal the background behind a traditional Japanese sport that is now only practised on a single track in the world; they examine the relationships that fans develop with consumer objects from the realms of fiction, and they build a narrative in which humans, data, machines and artificial intelligence work together.