Human-Animal-Machine

A series of activities echo Newton’s Cottage story in the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, London. We use rope as the central theme that ties the relationship between human puller, shire horse, and boat in London waterways.

year

2014

client

Moira Lascelles
Adriana Marques
Tim Eastop

team

Pei-Hsin Chen
Takayuki Ishii
Hannah Rogers
Nele Vos
Yaqi Zhang

collaborator

Des & Liz Pawson
Lea Nagano
Kohei Kanomata

Human Animal Machine is a family-friendly interactive event to celebrate Newton’s Cottage in the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, London—a structure commemorating the last lock keeper of Carpenters Road Lock, designed by the art/architecture collective Observatorium. The installation reflects the canal’s history as one of the significant transportation systems in the past London. Using the leading characters in this system—boat, shire horse, and human puller—we tied them altogether through the narrative of rope.

We held three activities to trigger the visitors to reflect. Firstly, a rope-making workshop led by the knot experts Des & Liz Pawson allows the audience to use various kinds of fabric. The second one is a tie-knotting workshop for kids. Lastly, creating a wire life-sizes shire horse from the rope visitors had made in the first activity.