To complement the installation of Oliver Bishop-Young during his residency at the Batofar (more info available here), we produced a device meant to enhance/encourage public interaction with the installation.
After months of work, continually reworking the concept and the implementation, we ended up creating something completely different from what we had originally conceived, but definitely more beautiful and much more intricate that we could have ever conceived without the help of a series of random events that we like to call serendipity.
The Cycling Fountain was meant to be a human-powered pump that would works as an alternative to the electrical pump pumping water in and out of the Seine.
The pumping apparatus was for the most part constructed from recycled bike parts: an old bike frame
constitutes the external structure of a peristaltic pump that we constructed from scratch. The pump is linked to the cranks through the bike chains so that water gets pumped only when the pedals are in motion. The idea was that people walking by could only get their curiosity satisfying by trying the machine - thereby contributing to pumping the water from the Seine, in an environmentally
friendly manner (human energy)
As far as possible, everything has been produced from recycled materials (mostly bike parts and old machine parts that we found along our ways from one place to
another) which have been brought to a new life by converting their original function into a new one that better
suits our purposes.