Rodar y Rodear

Fab Lab BCN

The film explores the question: how would a robotic arm see a product that has been produced by hand? and serves as an excuse to create a film-event that acts as a meeting point for different agents, each of which performs an activity dislocated from its usual range of action.

####Rodar y Rodear:



Rodar y Rodear” is an installation by Ainara Elgoibar (Hangar) for Sant Andreu Contemporani, in collaboration with Mymsa and Fab-Lab Barcelona.


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####Project :


The film explores the question: “how would a robotic arm see a product that has been produced by hand?” and serves as an excuse to create a film-event that acts as a meeting point for different agents, each of which performs an activity dislocated from its usual range of action: a handmade motorbike that has been restored to be a museum piece, an industrial robotic arm that has been programmed to film something which was produced with a pre-robotic sensitivity, and a sculpture installation for a history without a monument.


####Context:


Mymsa produced motorcycles in the neighbourhood of Sant Andreu in Barcelona between 1953 and 1963. Mymsa was a company founded by the Aragall brothers that served a market eager of cars that had to do with motorbikes due to production restrictions imposed by Franco’s regime. It closed when Seat launched the “600”, which corrected what had been an exceptional market situation. The actual heirs of the Aragall brothers buy and restore motorbikes for exhibition purposes.The actual automotive production processes have been robotized. KUKA robotic arms perform most of the activities that Mymsa-like factory workers performed in the past and motorbike restoration artisans take care of nowadays.Fab-Lab Barcelona owns one of these KUKA robotic arms, which is used in experimental projects around digital fabrication.



####Process :


The camera chosen by the artist have been fixed to the robot thanks to a custom design produced with the Laser cutter within FabLabBcn.


To plan the path of the robot, the artist had drawn a first sketch on the rhino software, using the native tool “camera path animation” to get a good overview of the result.


FabLabBcn used then a homemade script to generate a more complex path for the robot, using the table rotation to reach difficult point of view on the motorbike and enhance more spectacular movement. A last session of path editing occurs within the robot code to adjust the transition between each path (the fastest movements in the video).


Finally, the space of the robot have been adapted to fulfil the film necessity in term of sound, light and background. The resulting video have been exhibited with the motorcycle at Fundación Suñol, Barcelona.


####Credits: