Mario Cucinella, TECLA House, Massa Lombarda (Italy)

The word ‘robot’ evokes certain 20th-century obsessions. For a start, it brings to mind the servile figures if those roboti through which Karel Capek lent weight to the myth, and which found their most amiable expression in the pair of androids of the movie Star Wars. It can also refer to those loyal and generally useless domestic servants that get exhibited every year at Japanese technology fairs. And it serves to name our contemporary golems, the Prometheuses – whether automatons or replicas – that in the future will arrive and be difficult to distinguish from human beings, as Philip S. Dick warned us would happen through the disturbing novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and Ridley Scott through the even more disturbing film Blade Runner...[+]