Technology has long changed the way we perceive art. In recent years, however, it is also changing the way we are creating it. Aside from the recent influx of Artificial Intelligence-powered art, a great example is a recent replica of Antonio Canova’s marble sculpture Terpsichore made by a robot.
A robot designed by the company ROBOTOR has managed to perfectly recreate the Terpsichore sculpture out of marble in less than a week. The process started with obtaining a 3D scan of the original work and feeding it into the robot’s program. All it took from there was getting a block of marble and letting the robot do its magic.
“Delivered to the museum without any manual finish, a work that lives its own life: as a replica, it has its own clear function of representation and “memory multiplier,” explains the team behind the ROBOTOR.
According to ROBOTOR co-founders Filippo Tincolini and Giacomo Massari, the idea is not to have the artist replaced by a robot. Instead, they envisioned their sculpting robot as just another art tool. With the sculpting process being time-consuming, laborious, and sometimes dangerous, the robot would do all the hard work, and the artists would focus on the design of the artwork.
It remains to be seen how this idea will be accepted in the art world, but there is no doubt that it sounds quite intriguing.
