"Contingencies" and "encounters" are the two elements that have left their most profound mark in shaping the evolution of Daniel Spoerri's creative, artistic and intellectual identity for almost six decades. While living in different places and always traveling, in the Sixties Spoerri was at the same time a Zero artist, a Nouveau Réaliste, a Fluxus and mail artist. His fluctuating memberships during late Modernism explain why some areas of his work have not yet received their due attention and their connection to the whole picture has often escaped scholarly inquiry. The term "artistic animator" is inspired by the definition "Kunstanimator" given to him by his longstanding friend Karl Gerstner during an interview with Katerina Vatsella in 1995. Wherever he went, Spoerri was capable of inspiring others to make art, and at the same time he absorbed, interiorized and transformed ideas from others. Beyond his tableau pièges, which gave him immediate notoriety through an early purchase by the MoMA, Spoerri discovered a new way to approach the multiples in sculpture (Edition MAT), he transformed his trap pictures into an experimental narrative form (Topographie Anécdotée du Hasard), he initiated the Eat Art movement, he tested an innovative curatorial approach (the Musée Sentimental and the Giardino). Despite constant interruptions due to his semi-nomadic lifestyle, this oeuvre presents an extraordinary coherence, where none of these ventures can be properly understood without considering all the others.This book reconstructs the genesis of Spoerri's major ideas and the evolution of his artistic identity mainly through the principles of evolution and variation: one analytical that proceeds in diachronic progression, and the other as creative lateral thinking that synchronically explores alternative directions opening up an array of possibilities. This is the first monograph entirely devoted to Daniel Spoerri in the United States to date.