Call the tech squad

By Tyler Green, Special to The LA Times

IN the late 1980s, Pamela Kramlich saw a work of video art by Peter Fischli and David Weiss titled "The Way Things Go." The 30-minute piece shows a perpetual-motion machine built by the artists: A car propelled by a kind of firecracker bumps into a bowling ball, which hits a piece of cardboard, which somehow leads to the ignition of a flammable substance in a saucepot — and on and on.

Kramlich loved it. So she and her husband, venture capitalist Richard Kramlich, bought it for $350, their first video art purchase. "I started showing it at dinner parties," Pamela Kramlich says. "People loved it. Especially young people. I said to Dick, 'We should do more of this.' "

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