Kinesthetic Instruments is a hands-on workshop inviting participants to reflect on stagnation and movement through the making of small kinetic sculptures. Using paper, pliable plant materials, and waxed linen thread, participants will tie, glue, stitch, and assemble materials to create objects that respond to wind, gesture, and interaction.
Inspired by windsocks used to measure wind, kites that have long symbolized liberation and connection, and the playfulness of pinwheels, these handmade objects become tools for noticing, connecting, and imagining. Part sculpture and part instrument, they invite us to tune into the relationship between body and environment.
Together, we’ll slow down, pay attention, and discover how movement can transform the unseen into something visible and shared.
This workshop is part of the Pittsburgh Creative Corps artist program series, presented by Shiftworks Community + Public Arts and made possible by the City of Pittsburgh’s American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) Arts Programming initiative. For more info, visit: pittsburghcreativecorps.org.
About the Artist
Mak is an artist, designer, and researcher whose practice centers care-full space-making, understanding spaces as living systems of exchange between bodies, materials, memory, and meaning. They are drawn toward processes of possibility and approach design as a form of relationship-building, a way of tending to the invisible forces that shape how people feel, move, and orient themselves in the world.
Drawing from disability studies, phenomenology, and feminist design theory, Mak investigates how environments structure power through their affordances — how they invite, restrict, or reshape embodied experience. Their work examines how spatial and material systems can either constrain or expand possibility, and how design might contribute to more just and equitable ways of dwelling in and moving through the world.
Through publication design, spatial interventions, environmental graphics, and material fabrication, they develop projects that foreground lived experience, inviting attentiveness, sensory openness, presence, and belonging.
Registration is required below.
