Category: tinguely workshop

  • approach

    Tinguely’s Workshop: Exploring the Mechanical Poetics of ‘Tout Ramenė’ Introduction: The Visual and Emotional Resonance of Tinguely’s Work The art of Jean Tinguely is a celebration of movement, noise, and playful chaos. It possesses a distinct visual energy and a profound emotional resonance that speaks to the joy and absurdity of mechanical life. This workshop…

  • kinetic garden. description of the workshop

    This seven-day workshop offers an embodied approach of thinking with making. We invite participants to recreate the Tinguely practice through using found materials and, in an explorative fashion to put them together in a form of a kinetic garden. By kinetic garden we understand a place of co-habitation of living creatures and technological objects.  Led by…

  • day 7. sculpture garden

    Objective: This is the final day of the workshop when the results of the previous days’ work are assembled together and prepared for interaction with the public. setup Participants bring their sculptures outside and arrange them in the garden as a group — thinking about spacing, proximity, and what someone moving through the space encounters.…

  • day 6. relations

    objecives: The objective of the day is to develop principles of interaction between the kinetic objects participants have built. These interactions may be mechanical, spatial, rhythmic, or dramaturgical. By this stage of the workshop, each participant has begun developing a kinetic object with its own movement logic and character. On Day 6, the focus shifts…

  • day 5. translation

    objective: The question for today is not how do I build my sketch but how do I get close to my sketch with what I have. The found parts set the constraints. We will look at the mechanical parts present and at the sketch and ask: which part covers which role? What plays the transmission?…

  • 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. Tinguely’s chronollogical performances oftentimes went not according to the script (Homage to New York, Etudes pour une…

  • day 3. what can this body do?

    objective: Explore possible movements of the object by trying it out with their own bodies. Start making the kinetic sculpture. Trying the linkage mechanism experiment with design. Day three begins with a question posed by the philosopher Baruch Spinoza: What can a body do? Rather than approaching this question theoretically, participants explore it through direct…

  • day 2. scrapeyard

    objectives: This day participants will spend mostly outside, walking in the streets of Basel in the direction of the car scrapeyard. The goal of this walk is to implement Tinguely’s practice of discovering the discarded materials, mainly motors, but not exclusively, for the future kinetic sculptures. We could have an embodied approach to all the…

  • day 1. kinetic principles

    objectives: To create a context for the workshop by showing the kinetic principles used in Tinguely work. Tinguely built almost entirely from salvaged industrial components: washing machine motors, fan motors, bicycle wheels, leather belts, wire. He did not invent new mechanisms, but combined found ones. We will discuss three works of Tinguely and how he…