Robot

Catalog of the upcoming exhibition at Mudec in Milan

Mudec’s major exhibition allows for an immersion in the fascinating universe of robotics, a frontier discipline that is increasingly investing and influencing our society on a global scale.
The catalog, opened by a few essays by the curators framing the complex subject matter in general, follows the exhibition path, starting with classical Greece, winding through the astronomical and scenic machines of the Arab world and the inventions of Leonardo, then moving on to the Baroque Wunderkammern–among which the museum’s iconic work, the demon-automata by the Milanese scholar Lanfranco Settala, stands out–and ending with 18th-century automata and the products of the great Swiss watchmaking industry of the 19th century.
It then opens the scenario of the present day, of contemporary robotics and its application in various fields: the medical field, with artificial organs, rehabilitative exoskeletons, bionic limbs, up to the new frontiers of bioelectronic medicine; the work field, where more and more space is given to humanoid robots; and the relational field, the realm of “companion robots,” capable of interacting with the psychological dynamics of their interlocutors. Finally, some controversial current issues are touched upon, where technological aspects are intertwined with bioethical ones, such as the military use of robots, research on artificial intelligence (AI) and the reality of the cyborg, the human with artificial grafts.

BY
Alberto Mazzoni – physicist and bioengineer, scientific head of the Laboratory of Computational Neuroengineering at the Institute of Biorobotics of the Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna in Pisa.
Antonio Marazzi – full professor of Cultural Anthropology and director of the postgraduate course in Cultural and Social Anthropology at the University of Padua.
Lavinia Galli – art historian, curator of the Poldi Pezzoli Museum in Milan.