The founders of the Robotor company, which built a robot that can carve out stone masterpieces from Carrara marble, closely resemble the works of the great Italian sculptor Michelangelo of the Renaissance.
We are entering a new era of Sculpture, no more broken stones, chisels and dust; but 3D scanners, pixel clouds, detailed designers, and sculpting robots.
An Italian startup called Robotor has invented a machine that can carve out stone masterpieces from Carrara marble, almost identical to the great works of Italian sculptors of the time. Renaissance.
The limitation of the artwork sculpted by the robot
As CBS News reports, Robotor founder Giacomo Massari claims that his robot-made marble statues look almost exactly like man-made ones. Most of them are like that.
“I think, assuming the robot-made statues are 99 percent similar,” he told CBS. “But it is people who can make the difference. That one percent is very important.” He wanted to emphasize that only humans can breathe souls into those statues.
Massari goes even further, arguing that “robot technology does not take away human work, but improves it” — a bold statement, considering the art field that has existed for thousands of years.
The Art and Aid of Robots (Robartist)
Robotor’s newest robotic ‘sculptor’, dubbed ‘1L’, is 1.2 meters tall, a zinc-alloy machine capable of carefully carving a slab of marble day and night into beautiful pieces artwork. People just need to breathe souls into them to create valuable works of art.
The company claims the technology is revolutionary.
The company proudly declares on its Robotor website: “It is in the heart of the Carrara quarry that produces the precious marble that Michelangelo used to sculpt his statues; we have developed an innovative solution based on research and interaction between art, local area, tradition and technology.
Now inanimate rocks can be transformed, even under extreme conditions, into works of art, in a way once considered unimaginable.
We are entering a new era of sculpture, no more broken rocks, chisels and dust; it’s the 3D scanner, the pixel clouds and the design. Robotic technology adds value by making work that is hard, risky and dangerous for humans, it makes life as easy as possible.”
Robots take jobs away from people?
Not surprisingly, not everyone is happy with robots taking over manual tasks, given that some important things can be lost in the process of modernizing processes with new technology.
“We run the risk of forgetting how to work with our hands,” sculptor Lorenzo Calcinai of Florence Cathedral told CBS. I hope that some know-how and knowledge will always remain, although the further we move forward, the harder it becomes to preserve it.”
(Text translated from Vietnamese)