When it was said that digital and robotics were changing work, we had forgotten about the craft of the sculptor. As if it belonged to another era. Or maybe because it is an artist. Yet digital is trying to enter significantly in other artistic sectors: such as music, where artificial intelligence creates music so far of modest success; or literature, with novels and poems (of negligible value) always created by a computer. For now, robot painters are perfect for painting cars and walls not for making paintings and in fact what was sold a few months ago for over 600 thousand dollars, causing a certain sensation, is not a painting made by a robot but the video taken from the robot of a painter who portrays him. In short, art has always evolved with technology but the role of the artist remains central. However, what is happening in Carrara could be different.
We are talking about that place in the world where there are the quarries from which the famous marble used for immortal sculptures from the Renaissance onwards comes out. Less and less used by sculptors because marble processing requires effort, very long times, and some health risks. A robot job, Michelle Basaldella, 38, and Giacomo Massari, 37, must have thought, who after years of studying the subject, have created some robots (in fact robotic arms), which through a diamond tip are able to create any sculpture by copying the digital file from a computer. A fact: for a famous sculpture Canova took 5 years, to reproduce it took 270 hours, just over a day.
Carrara’s robots do not make copies: they create the sculptures of great international artists who send digital files to Carrara and receive back the almost finished works, just a touch of a chisel in practice. Is it still art? It should be noted that compared to what happens for music, literature and painting, here technology does not play the creative part, but the manual, artisanal one. And it seems to do it very well. Someone obviously horrified, the New York Times told the story with genuine wonder (and a provocative title: “Michelangelo is no longer needed”). I think that art has always evolved with technology and this is perhaps just another step: the sculptor designs and the robot helps him as in the Renaissance workshops the great masters had several helpers. We will talk about it.
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