Waterloo Street Stories 2024: Cor Machina (Heart of the Machine)

Cor Machina (Heart of the Machine) is an immersive and interactive experience combining poetry, sound, and light. Part of “Waterloo Street Stories 2024: Interplay” and Centre 42’s 10th Anniversary celebrations, this event celebrates the rich histories and communities of Waterloo Street.

Waterloo Street represents Singapore’s diverse heritage, and Cor Machina explores the connections between communities and the arts, symbolised by the typewriter as a relic with the poet as its beating heart. The typewriter’s mechanical clatter echoes modern life’s relentless grind, yet within this noise, there is beauty—a reminder that even in the machine, the human heart creates with hope.

Cor Machina captures this playfully, by inviting participants to explore these themes through creation. Audiences first enter an installation of pre-made prompts that draws from personal, communal memories and stories of the street. They’re invited to send in an order for a poem to the Proletariat Poetry Factory, which becomes a meta memory machine. Poets, musicians, and artists create new memories and stories from their inputs, blending them with the street’s past.

The work evokes collective remembrance and celebrates the street’s heritage in a contemporary context. The intent is to spark meaningful conversations, weaving together past and present, individual and collective experience. This performance is also in conjunction with Centre 42’s 10th Anniversary, serving to commemorate our placemaking and memory making on Waterloo Street.