day 4. failure

Objective: Falling. Trying to think of a sculpture that doesn’t work. Barely functioning, sensitive, honest failure. Design phase: make a drawing or a sketch. Making of the kinetic sculpture. What happens if a machine keeps trying despite its failing.

1. Natalia: Lecture on Tinguely in relation to failure.  

Tinguely made sculptures that were honestly failing, unfinished. His machines don’t fail accidentally, but are trying and struggling and almost-but-not-quite. The wobble, the slip, the labored grinding, convey a sense of struggle, of suffering, and create a sense of aliveness, something lacking in the precision engineered machine. It’s almost as if the stuff from the trash comes to life again and tries to catch up with technological progress, but never quite manages. This is where one can relate to the machine emotionally, as a subject. 

2. Werner: Design phase: drawing and sketching

During this session, one is asked to make a drawing of what a honestly failing sculpture looks like. How can one design a mechanism that barely works? What kind of components are useful for this? We will go back to some of the Tinguely works to see how he made this happen. How can you make something with the components you got from the scrapyard? 

3. Werener: The anatomy of failure

We will make a couple of sketches of possible failure mechanisms? Where is the motor and what transmission will you use? A belt can slip or an arm almost gets stuck, a motor gets just enough power to move forward and chokes at certain points. 

What is it trying to do? Think of an action that the sculpture attempts, like trying to stand up or move forward, trying to breath? The sculpture has to convey that there’s a goal it’s trying to reach. How would it properly function? And how do you design its failure to do so? 

Each participant shows their sketches to the group and we discuss it together, see where it can be improved, how it might function to well or too little. Failure should be something precise. How can you make it fail not once, but over and over, create a Sisyphean experience. 

Experiment with design.