In Carrara, Italy, whose marble quarries provided the medium through which the artistic talent of Miguel Angel, now it is the robots that chisel the stone. The precise execution of the sculptures made in this grayish-white marble is carried out by ABB2, a four-meter-long aluminum robotic arm.
“Artists like to perpetuate that idea that they are locked in with the chisel and hammer,” he tells The New York Times Giacomo Massari, one of the founders of Robotor, the company that owns the sculptor robots. Massari, 37, argues that abandoning traditional manual techniques is the only way to ensure the continuity of Italian marble sculpture.
Since the Renaissance, the works made in the art workshops of Italy are some of the most valuable and recognized exports of the country. In the 18th century, stone from local quarries was transformed into hundreds of neoclassical statues, and dozens of sculpture workshops were opened in the area.
Massari says that, over time, many artists discarded marble as a material for the months or even years it takes to complete a single handmade statue. Fewer and fewer young people from Carrara were willing to do the grueling task of chiselling the stone and breathing in the dust that is released in the process for hours, with the health problems that this entails.
In the robotics workshop, where technicians test a gigantic new robot, Massari points to a reproduction of Psyche reanimated by the kiss of love, masterpiece of neoclassical sculpture, of Antonio Canova. “Canova took five years to do this; we took 270 hours ”, compare.
Originally, Massari and his partner bought the robots from local tech companies. But as his clients –among whom there were and are names of established artists such as Jeff Koons, Zaha hadid Y Vanessa Beecroft, and many others who choose to remain anonymous – started paying them extraordinarily high commissions, they began to manufacture their own robots, with their own software and German mechanical parts.
However, not everyone in Carrara shows the same degree of approval for this technology. “If Miguel Ángel saw the robot, he would pull his hair out,” he says in the note of NYT Michele Monfroni, 49, in his workshop in the Tuscan mountains. “Robots are business, sculpture is passion,” he sums up. Far from saving its artistic legacy, according to Monfroni, Italy thus runs the risk of losing the international reputation of its artisan tradition.
Marco Ciampolini, an art historian and director of the Carrara museum, does not consider the use of robots to be a total break with the past, since many great artists, including Michelangelo, delegated much of their work. “The idea that the artist works alone is a romantic concept invented in the nineteenth century,” he says to the NYT, and adds that although technological advances facilitate the task of the sculptor, to preserve the artistic value the human touch is still necessary: ”Only the human knows when to stop.”
With the emergence of robots in the field of sculpture, many debates are opened and it is also questioned who deserves the credit for the work. In the old Florentine workshops, many sculptures and paintings were the fruit of many hands, but they only bore the signature of the master. Now it is the Carrara robots that work in the shadows, and many of the artists who commission the realization of their design demand confidentiality and that their name is not leaked.
Digital Stone Project
For decades, robots have been able to reproduce almost anything designed or made by humans, but faster, with greater accuracy, and at a lower cost.
For the Digital Stone Project, a non-profit organization that connects artists with digital design engineers and manufacturers of robotic stonework products, the most exciting thing is to push the boundaries of automated stone carving systems. The resulting work harnesses both the ability of digital design programs to capture the creativity and precision of robotic drills and chisels.
Jon isherwood, one of the sculptors who founded this organization in 2005, clarifies: “The robot only does what the 3D design document tells it to do. It’s like being the master of a traditional workshop, where the assistants do all the hard work ”. Thanks to automation, the duration of the manufacturing process can also be accurately estimated.
But beyond practical aspects, the Digital Stone Project has set out to discover what manufacturing with robots and digital programs can contribute in a special way: “A Miguel Angel In the 16th century, it used to use forged steel tools like flat chisels, burins and things like that, with which it achieved a concrete surface finish, ”says Isherwood. The robotic process is the elimination of material by means of a rotating head that moves over the entire surface ”.
Isherwood founded the Digital Stone Project in 2005, and years later established relationships with Garfagnana Innovazione, a company based in Gramolazzo, less than 90 minutes from Carrara, created in 2011 to supply digitally manufactured stonework elements for architecture.
Since 2013, Garfagnana has provided the Digital Stone Project with engineering, materials and machinery services, including robotics and scanning devices.
Lorenzo Busti, programmer and technician from Garfagnana, explains: “The artist sends us a physical or digital model, our programs translate it and we physically manufacture it. While most commonly engineers work with computer-aided 3D design files, they can also 3D scan a physical model and scale it according to the artist’s needs. “
Manufacturing a complex part takes about four weeks. Gabriel Ferri, who develops scanning and cutting programs for Garfagnana, points out: “A sculptor who works by hand, in the traditional style, would take ten or eleven months for such a project.”
Thanks to technology, sculptors can expand their “creative vocabulary.” For Isherwood, the impact of computers on sculpture is similar to that of music: “In the same way that software can create digital sounds that do not come from analog instruments, the robot can produce a shape that does not come from tools. analog ”.
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