This is the most unusual book of the week. The Unposed (EoAT) by Michala Paludan is published by Disko Bay. This new sci-fi fantasy contains 101 photos of robotic “hands” photographed between 2021-2024 in Germany, Denmark, Japan, Korea and the United States. From digital paws to laser sensors, piano-playing electro-fingers to a not-so-dexterous clamp, this book shows the human hand versioned as high-tech utensil: holders, pinchers, grabbers, supporters, strokers and cutters whose likenesses to the real thing vary according to particularity of their functions.
In the robotics industry, the acronym EoAT refers to End of Arm Tools; that is, a tool required for performing a specific handlike task such as holding, cutting or lifting and the hardest thing to design on a robot. As the subject of a portrait, the machine – rather than what it produces – is the focus and, in mirroring the hands of human workers, Paludan emphasizes their absence thus we are given not only a portrait of an industry, but a portrait of how that industry might interpolate us.
Michala Paludan (b. 1983) is a Danish artist living and working in Copenhagen.
Michala Paludan : The Unposed (EoAT)
Disko Bay
Texts by Lakshmi Luthra, Lars Bang Larsen and Ryan S. Jeffery
Clothbound debossed hardcover with tip-in
21,50 × 26 cm
224 pages
101 color plates
Edition of 800
ISBN 978-87-975274-1-2
www.diskobay.org
Instagram: @disko_bay_books
Worldwide distribution via Idea Books
