Robot

"The definitive work on the robot aesthetic throughout history, from Ancient Greece to the present day. An inexhaustible source of inspiration for fashion, music and design. From Ancient Greece onwards, humans have been swept up in a race to replicate and rebuild themselves. We design automatons that mimic human functions or improve on them, born from a desire to take evolution into our own hands, or even play God. In fact, every form of cultural expression has at some point investigated the rich and stimulating field of robotics, reaching different conclusions and outcomes every time. Robots have infiltrated our social consciousness. They are everywhere, from Leonardo da Vinci's drummer robot to the futurist man-machine; from Frankenstein to the works of Isaac Asimov and Philip Dick, inventor of the 'replicant'; from Edward Gordon Craig's theory of the actor as a super-puppet to Daft Punk and Kraftwerk, the krautrock band who used replica mannequins of themselves at the end of their concert. It doesn't end there, either. Robots feature heavily in cinema (Fritz Lang's Metropolis, Ridley Scott's Blade Runner, and George Lucas's Star Wars saga, to name a few). They star in innumerabl