Roll On, You Crazy Tire!
The team at Tuk South visited one of the tallest sand dunes in Chile and did the obvious: threw a tire down it and followed it with a drone to see how long it would roll. The answer: almost three minutes. Take a break from whatever shit you might be dealing with at the moment, set your troubles aside, and watch this simple story of tenacity and gravity.
And yes, they went to retrieve the tire after it stopped: “Fear not. We collected the tyre. Leave only tuk tuk tyre tracks, take only memories.”
(I would like to see a Nolan cut of this, where it’s ambiguous if the tire stops at the end or not, like Cobb’s totem at the end of Inception.)
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Speaking of metaphors, I read the article “Welcome to the Era of Big Stupid in America”, then I watched the video of a tire rolling across the dunes in Chile. Stupid, but eventually the tire falls over without anything bad happening.
Meanwhile, in America the stupid keeps on rolling.
The roll is impressive, but even more amazing is the total lack of engagement-bait BS before or after the actual content. It fails to follow the expected formula of "initial small snippet of action, five minutes of excited talking heads, action with irritating voiceover, postmortem talking, credits, outtakes".
Plus the annoying music loop with catch phrase and signature dance. #TireDance
I would have loved a postmortem, maybe a map to show the path and distance. I suppose when producing something like this you can pick a direction, more art or more nerd/science. They went more art which I can appreciate.
This takes me back to the good ol’ days of random internet goodness. And no ads or screaming heads. And an excellent choice of music. 👏🏼
I thought this would be more of a stunt, with a soundtrack to match the "extreme" nature of the experiment, and instead it's almost art, a strange blend of physics experiment meets sculpture meets landscape photography, all set to a song that I initially interpreted as ironic but by the end realized was completely earnest and the best possible choice. (Perhaps an indie auteur is poised to reclaim Enya a la Greta Gerwig and Dave Matthews Band?)
I remember that song being the music on hold when you called Adobe Technical Support back in the '90s…back when tech support actually was a reachable entity (and long distance connections carried a per-minute charge).
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