Of Robots and Hands

Year: 2026
Institution: Campus MoMADe / Mobilier National
Paris, FR

Guests
Caroline Magre, communications manager at the Piton boutique, which specializes in rugs and tapestries.
Alina Glushkova, teacher-researcher at the Robotics Centre of École des Mines Paris – PSL.
The creative duo AATB, tireless explorers of non-industrial uses of robots.
Julien Lecarme, of Les Compagnons du Devoir et du Tour de France, journeyman carpenter and deputy director of the Collège des Métiers.

open.spotify.com

Podcast

Legend has it that in the 18th century, Jacques Vaucanson, the famous French inventor of the automaton flute player and the digesting duck, was received so rapturously in the Parisian salons that King Louis XV tasked him with modernizing the looms of the Lyon silk weavers. His reception by the canuts (Lyon's silk workers) in Lyon was considerably less warm, and ended with stones being thrown…

And yet the Vaucanson loom clearly prefigures the Jacquard loom, a machine now considered an asset in the weaver's toolkit, a craft trade that belongs on the official list of métiers d'art (fine crafts)!

This anecdote highlights the full ambivalence of our subject. To claim that artisans will find tomorrow's tools in yesterday's robots is a line I'll be careful not to cross without a lively debate… And that is precisely what this episode of Nouvelles Perspectives Artisanales (New Craft Perspectives) is about.

To view the slideshow for this episode here

A podcast from Campus MoMADe, in partnership with the Mobilier National, programmed and hosted by Grégoire Talon, as part of the Re-Source project. Re-Source is an initiative supported by the French State under the AMI CMA (Skills and Professions of the Future call for expressions of interest) of the France 2030 programme, operated by the Caisse des Dépôts.

This podcast was edited and produced by ICI AU LOIN.