When artistic minds and art enthusiasts hear the name Carrara, they relate it to Michaelangelo. The Italian sculptor spent years traversing the hills in the city in search of the perfect marble. Little did he know that 600 years down the line robots would be efficient enough to make him redundant, almost.
Miles away from the global air-conditioned tech world, Filippo Tincolini and Giacomo Massari are revolutionizing the art of sculpting through their startup Litix. Born in the city of sculptures in Italy—these 40-year-old entrepreneurs are producing sculptures for artists, architects, and designers on commission through their automated robots. The company, set up in 2004, collaborated with the Oxford-based heritage preservation organisation, Digital Archeology, and made a one-third scale model of Syria’s Arch of Palmyra. The sculpture was destroyed by ISIS in 2015.
Educated in Carrara, Tincolini witnessed the sculptors in the city using technology like electric grinders, diamond-beaded band saws, and pneumatic chisels. He drew his idea from there. The entrepreneur learned to make electrical parts for assembly lines from his father and later bought a robot to work on stone. He has not looked back since.
With the use of electro-spindles with an automatic tool change function, Litix uses a mechanical arm to create sculptures. This technology runs through a proprietary software called OR-OS, which has a unique system of taking a 3D model and generating an optimized workflow. It has made human intervention negligible. With the automated process, the two entrepreneurs have announced that they can create a structure within five months. Self-programming the robot for speed, effort, and power of milling can result in it weathering heavy loads, even in the most hostile environments.
Massari believes that Michaelangelo would have used robots if it was possible. In an interaction with The New York Times’s Elaine Sciolino, the entrepreneur said, “Of course, he would have used robots—100 percent. An algorithm does what a caliper used to do. I have the time to contemplate a beautiful sunset because a machine does all the hard stuff.”
With robots, everything has become easy. In fact, tycoons like Sridhar Vembu of multinational technology company Zoho are thinking of putting a stop to hiring human labor. Will the sculptors of Carrara follow suit? Only time will tell.
HOW DOES IT WORK
It all starts with a scan of the sculpture to be replicated. The robot first analyses the stone or material it is going to work on. It will then identify the points around the material where it can carve and chisel. Self-programming aids the software to go on working without any need of additional inputs. The robot can also reduce material waste as it tries to repurpose the discarded material into smaller sculptures.