Innovative Automata Investigations
Recently I’ve led two very different automata workshops that have each shown the ‘wide walls’ of simple mechanical explorations with everyday materials like cardboard, wire and collaged images.
A couple of weeks ago I hosted a ‘cranky contraptions’ workshop at the Carl-Schurz-Haus, a local center for German-American cultural exchange. We had a full group of families working for about two hours on some really interesting automata designs. Along with some more basic crank slider models, I introduced a couple of examples that used paper linkages to make feet running, characters that connected to backgrounds, models that used brass paper brads for linkage movements and a mouth chomping up and down with a paper hinge.
With these examples I’m trying to find the balance between something that inspires participants to make their own design and not just copy what’s shown. Sometimes it’s helpful to make these models incomplete or seem like they could be made even better by the learners.
I was impressed by the wide variety of stories and mechanisms that people explored during the workshop. There were waving lucky cats, flying starships, surfing cats, a soda drinking octopus and some really sweet hand-drawn or collaged characters.
Many of the ideas and designs that workshop participants made will inspire new examples, fulfilling a key part of the creative learning spiral of prototyping and sharing that’s part of the tinkering process.
A second inspiring experience in stretching the bounds of automata making was the recently completed (11th!!!) iteration of Cabaret Mechanical Theatre’s automata global tinkering workshop. Alongside artist/educators Lou Cousin and Kathryn Rathke and a host of CMT collaborators we hosted about 24 participants in an six week long online experience.
A big part of the course is the movement from doing tinkerable but more constrained kits to developing personal automata explorations. The goal for the course isn’t that participants become expert automata makers but that they get comfortable with the idea of coming up with projects, testing ideas, troubleshooting problems and sharing their work.
With the extended course time it’s really fun to see the wide variety of materials used and how many different directions the projects. We encourage the participants to share their sketches and prototypes so that they have a record of all the experiments.
I’m looking forward to more explorations to push the bounds of this endlessly tinkerable topic. In the fall we start the next round of the online workshop (sign up today!) and I’ll be looking for other opportunities to explore playful contraptions and mechanisms at Carl-Schurz-Haus and other venues around Freiburg;
A couple of weeks ago I hosted a ‘cranky contraptions’ workshop at the Carl-Schurz-Haus, a local center for German-American cultural exchange. We had a full group of families working for about two hours on some really interesting automata designs. Along with some more basic crank slider models, I introduced a couple of examples that used paper linkages to make feet running, characters that connected to backgrounds, models that used brass paper brads for linkage movements and a mouth chomping up and down with a paper hinge.
With these examples I’m trying to find the balance between something that inspires participants to make their own design and not just copy what’s shown. Sometimes it’s helpful to make these models incomplete or seem like they could be made even better by the learners.
I was impressed by the wide variety of stories and mechanisms that people explored during the workshop. There were waving lucky cats, flying starships, surfing cats, a soda drinking octopus and some really sweet hand-drawn or collaged characters.
Many of the ideas and designs that workshop participants made will inspire new examples, fulfilling a key part of the creative learning spiral of prototyping and sharing that’s part of the tinkering process.
A second inspiring experience in stretching the bounds of automata making was the recently completed (11th!!!) iteration of Cabaret Mechanical Theatre’s wonderful automata global tinkering workshop. Alongside artist/educators Lou Cousin and Kathryn Rathke and a host of CMT collaborators we hosted about 24 participants in an six week long online experience.
A big part of the course is the movement from doing tinkerable but more constrained kits to developing personal automata explorations. The goal for the course isn’t that participants become expert automata makers but that they get comfortable with the idea of coming up with projects, testing ideas, troubleshooting problems and sharing their work.
With the extended course time it’s really fun to see the wide variety of materials used and how many different directions the projects. We encourage the participants to share their sketches and prototypes so that they have a record of all the experiments.
I’m looking forward to more explorations to push the bounds of this endlessly tinkerable topic. In the fall we start the next round of the online workshop (sign up today!) and I’ll be looking for other opportunities to explore playful contraptions and mechanisms at Carl-Schurz-Haus and other venues around Freiburg.