The Electromechanical Workshop was done in collaboration with my friend and colleague Darsha Hewitt, who is currently a Guest Professor for Media Art/Sound at the Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design. The workshop was part of her DIY electronics and sound seminar titled The (Un)portable Media Experiment, which draws inspiration from the cumbersome past of portable media devices. The students had been already exploring some vintage machines in the ZKM archives and the plan was to build electromechanical contraptions of our own.

Thankfully Darsha had already a pretty extensive collection of electro-trash, including vacuum cleaners, printers and fluorescent tube lamps, among other things, which we could use as a starting point for the machines. She had also already practised some motor control circuits with the students, so the next step was to look at some mechanical parts and examples. After that we started building and testing mechanism using scrap wood, Fischertechnik parts, tie-wraps, screws, rubber bands, ball bearing and metal rods in addition to the dismantled devices.

Two days is not a lot of time to come up with a functioning machine or an installation, but we got pretty far. On the right you can see the projects in progress – the students have been building the machines further since the workshop. In addition to movement, sounds triggered by various mechanisms were an integral part of the machines.

Special thanks to Darsha for inviting me to Karlsruhe and to Lena for helping out with the workshop.