Understood as a key feature of petty-apartheid and its relationship to the science of psycho-technics, the Laboratory of Kinetic Objects (LoKO) ties into several research inquiries at the centre that explore the sensory effects of apartheid in the everyday. LoKO is located at the CHR’s Iyatsiba Lab in Woodstock, Cape Town, and is home to resident artists Ukwanda Puppetry and Design Collective, Siphokazi Mpofu, Luyanda Ngodlwana and Sipho Ngxola. Trained in the arts of puppetry by Handspring Puppet Company , makers of the celebrated theatrical phenomenon, War Horse, Ukwanda support the work of the centre by enabling research and artistic interventions that shed light on the changing relationship between the human and technological. Ukwanda have been integral to the research endeavours of the CHR since 2010 but have also become leading theatre makers and public arts practitioners involved in independent arts projects. Their theatre work includes Qawe (2014), Warona (2018), MAXEKE: THIS WORK IS NOT FOR YOURSELVES (2023) and have been central to a collaboration with Net vir Pret in the rural town of Barrydale in their annual reconciliation day festival since 2010.

LoKO’s exploration in many ways opens a discursive and aesthetic space for the consideration of the human, technological and the ecological. In such terms, we are addressing the inherited ‘taken-as-given’ conceptions of the human such as haunt the academic humanities, where theories of race, and the histories of material culture are integral to key conceptions of the ‘fully human’ as a philosophical legacy. The association with Ukwanda has generated significant research areas such as communicating the humanities, becoming technical of the human, and aesthetics and politics that form the key research undertakings of the CHR.

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