Natalia Fedorova

an artist, researcher, and educator studying machine art through the prism of empathy. her artistic work focuses on mediation between the natural languages and the languages of machines and living systems.

  • 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…

  • a conductor of desire

    In Mille Plateax Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari give a definition of a body without organs as a necessary component for desire. The concretize that it is the indefinite article that is always a conductor of desire. The work is an indefinite article generator that uses AI to create conductors of desire.

  • Machines to be Another

    Book project summary Machines to be Another, Chapter 4 Machines of Destruction, Chapter 1 This book will  explore empathetic  and embodied algorithmic art, bioart and simulated digital and robotic environments. These machines explain people to themselves being reflections of either human behaviour or mental patterns as humans are fixed and crystallised in every machine (Simondon). Machines…

  • Être le vent pour des arbres migrateurs

    Être le vent pour des arbres migrateurs : atelier de poésie générative. Je propose un projet d’atelier de poésie générative Être le vent pour des arbres migrateurs. Les participants créent les poèmes basés sur les données des arbres et de leurs sentiments comme les immigrants.D’abord, on va traduire les données collectées par les capteurs (température de…

  • Topography of Destruction, an attempt to build an empathy machine

    Topography of  Destruction  is a workshop on reflexive writing and the creation of an interactive VR installation dedicated to sensing destroyed spaces (Kharkiv, Ukraine). We start with by exploring the Minecraft version of Kharkiv to immerse ourselves in the geography of the city before it was touched by the war. At the moment both sides…