day 2. scrapeyard

What objects can move and how?

We could have an embodied approach to all the activities. Embodying different qualities in movement that can relate to different materials. Closing your eyes and feeling what qualities you’re drawn to intuitively. Awakening the senses during the walk to the metal scrapyard. 

1. Artist talk by Werner. He brings the objects from the scrapyard he uses in his work. He explains the functional parts of the wiper motor.

2. Tour of Basel to find materials (car scrapyard bike parts). Marta and Werner
3. Sensory walk
4. Testing the materials

This part of the workshop is where the Tinguely analysis becomes embodied. Students just spent time in the museum learning to read mechanisms. Now the question is: can students spot the same logic in a pile of discarded car parts? Tinguely himself was a regular at scrapyards, and the Basel region was industrially dense enough that he had extraordinary material access. 

Before looking in the scrapyard, Werner will give a brief introduction to what to look for, what students can do and how torque and speed are important when choosing the right motor and mechanism. Most car scrapyards allow you to take the components out yourself. We will bring basic tools to take the parts we need. The following parts are important:

Motors:

• Windshield wiper motors
• Window regulator motors
• Heater blower motors
• Seat Adjustment motors
• Cooling fan motors

Transmission

• Windshield wiper linkages
• Break cables 

• Joints 
• Timing chains and sprockets

As we travel to the scrapyard, Marta will do an exercise focused on colour, material, texture to surprise ourselves with the properties of the object. 

3. Marta: Sensory Walk: Awakening Material Perception

Tinguely didn’t approach scrap primarily as a set of functional mechanical components; he approached it as a field of potential movement, character, and chance. The scrapyard was not only a supply store but also a place where forms, rhythms, and unexpected relationships could emerge.

On the way to the scrapyard, Marta will guide participants through a short somatic exercise designed to awaken the senses and shift perception toward the material qualities of objects.

Participants are invited to temporarily suspend the instinct to identify things by their function. Instead, attention is directed toward texture, weight, temperature, color, and shape. Through simple prompts—such as softening the gaze, briefly closing the eyes, or touching surfaces encountered along the way—participants explore how materials communicate through sensation before they are interpreted intellectually.

These perceptions are translated into small embodied responses. A rigid surface might invite a sharp or angular movement, a loose cable might inspire a swinging gesture, while a coiled spring may suggest compression and release. Through the body, participants begin to sense how materials might move, even before encountering them mechanically.

This exercise echoes the spirit of Tinguely’s practice. Working in scrapyards throughout Switzerland and France, he often selected materials not only for their engineering possibilities but also for their expressive and poetic potential. Springs, chains, motors, and gears became elements of unpredictable mechanical “characters.” What mattered was not perfect functionality, but the energy, rhythm, and personality that could emerge from assembled fragments.

By approaching the scrapyard through sensory curiosity first, participants cultivate a form of material innocence. Objects are encountered not as fixed tools with predetermined uses, but as open invitations for movement and transformation. This prepares the group to recognize the latent choreography within discarded parts—much like Tinguely himself did when transforming industrial debris into animated kinetic sculptures.

4. Testing the motors

Werner prepared control circuits for the sculptures. This consists of a switch for ON OFF and direction and speed control. The participants are asked to test their found motors, which connections are there? How do they move? How slow can the motors move? And how strong are they?

1. Does it run — switch it on, listen to it, feel the torque at the shaft by hand.
2. Speed control — turn the dial across the full range. Find where it drops out at the low end, note the usable range for their intended mechanism.
3. Try the different terminals — most wiper motors have multiple terminals that give different speed/torque combinations due to internal winding taps. Try each one and feel the difference. Swap the polarity to confirm direction reversal.