On 20 November 2025, Dr. Buket Altinoba gave a guest lecture on the topic of “Die Skulpturmaschine – Kunst und Technologie im 19. Jahrhundert” (“The Sculpture Machine – Art and Technology in the 19th century”.

Dr. Buket Altinoba, art historian at Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich, is researching the intersections of art, technology and industrial innovation in the 19th century in her project “Sculpture Machines: Competition between Reproduction Techniques 1770–1880” (funded by the German Research Foundation). Her lecture highlighted how artists and engineers worked closely together to develop new mechanical reproduction techniques for precisely duplicating and reducing the size of sculptures. These techniques not only changed production methods, but also the concept of originality, materiality and artistic authorship.

Using examples such as Benjamin Cheverton's sculpture machines, Altinoba showed how closely artistic and technical ways of thinking were intertwined, enabling new forms of access to art and knowledge. At the same time, she opened up a perspective on the present: just as 19th-century mechanisation transformed artistic practices, today’s digital technologies – from 3D scanning to algorithmic modelling – are shaping the production, distribution and perception of art. The lecture combined historical and contemporary dimensions of technical image production and reflected on how processes of reproduction continue to shape the conditions of cultural access to this day.

Dr. Buket Altinoba is conducting research on the topic of “Sculpture Machines: Competition between Reproduction Techniques 1770–1880” at the Institute of Art History at LMU Munich. Her lecture highlights mechanical processes of sculptural reproduction as an intersection between art and technology. Starting from the Renaissance ideal of the uomo universale, she shows how artists and engineers in the 19th century developed new forms of mass production and workshop organisation, revealing analogies between mechanical invention and artistic creation.