The Digital Stone Project and Garfagnana Innovazione are collaborating for the fourth time to bring artists, designers and architects, to the historic Garfagnana region of Italy to work with new technology and world-renowned Tuscan marble.

Hardcopy is the result of an intensive workshop in which each artist produced a marble sculpture carved with a 7-axis robot arm programmed by Garfagnana Innovazione technicians and finished by hand. This is a unique collaboration between artists, engineers and the advanced technologies at Garfagnana Innovazione. These artists are merging old forms of sculpture and labor with new technologies, and reinvigorate ancient technologies with contemporary digital practice. These new strategies of expression are supplemented with rich formal approaches, along side theoretical constructs. These artists have repurposed software and machinery designed for the aerospace and automotive industries to the humanistic purpose of art. They collaborated with robotics engineer Gabriel Ferri (Garfagnana Innovazione) to create all of the computational data that drives the robotic cutting arm. In addition to using use computer aided design (CAD) and computer aided machinery (CAM) the artists have also employed direct modeling, scanning and animation software to develop these sculptures. The works are experimental, exploratory, and visually stunning.

The works were exhibited, from 2 to 31 July 2016, at the Ex Marmi Room in Pietrasanta.