Two robot drummers. Two steel drums.
A human performer interfacing with machines.
Mechatronics and music. The repetitiveness of industrial production becomes a gesture of music.

A project in which the past of the Italian avant-garde returns in all its contemporaneity to identify a new relationship between humans and machines. The movement and work of factories on show, translated through the interactive digital languages of the contemporary world. A journey taking us from the Nag Hammadi codices, Gnostic texts from third century AD, to the code of computer music and to contemporary myth, through pieces inspired by the works of Ballard and Burroughs on the relationship between and merging of humans and machines, as shaped by technology and the imaginary, by the virtual and metal.

The orchestra consists of robot drummers that play steel drums "live" under the direction of a performer. They represent the movement and work of the factories which literally built the city of Turin. Paying tribute to the futurist poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, the orchestra builds an ideal bridge between Turin's industrial past and the city's current transformation into a city of knowledge. The ties to futurism emerge from the poetics of the artist himself, forming a machinic mysticism that sheds new light on the mechano-metaphysics of the Futurists. The music played by Orchestra Meccanica Marinetti is shaped by various different inputs. The rhythm of the machines combines with digital choruses through the continuous interaction of the performer's gestures, the algorithmic precision of the sound processors, and the power of the robots' industrial motors. The music produced is orchestral at times, almost medieval in the purity of the digital voices, but suddenly abstract and numerical at others, before returning to more minimalist melodies.

Machines that dream of music?

The robot drummers have been designed and built by the Mechatronic Lab (LIM) of Politechnic of Turin,Italy, thanks collaboration with Angelo Comino and local robotic company: Prima Electronics, ERXA e ACTUA.