Michala Paludan The Unposed (EoAT)
The Unposed (EoAT) is the first monograph by Danish artist Michala Paludan. The book is a collection of photographic portraits of robot “hands” encountered across several countries at research facilities, robot companies and trade fairs, as well as more unexpected settings – a temple in Kyoto, a Tokyo train station, a museum in Seoul, and sex shops in Copenhagen, Ringsted, and Las Vegas.
In robotics, EoAT stands for End-of-Arm Tool: the device attached to the end of a robotic arm to perform a specific handlike task. Often considered one of the most challenging components of a robot to design, these tools are shaped by the particular demands of the work they perform. Paludan approaches these machines as subjects of portraiture. Rather than photographing what they produce, she turns her attention to the tools themselves. In their attempts to replicate, replace, or extend the human hand, the EoATs also point to the workers who are no longer there.
The book’s essays by Ryan S. Jeffery, Lars Bang Larsen, and Lakshmi Luthra place Paludan’s project within a longer history of typological portraiture and the photography of labor — from August Sander’s unfinished People of the Twentieth Century and the Bechers’ industrial typologies, to the Gilbreths’ early motion studies of the working hand. Together they read the book as both an intimate catalogue of contemporary automation and a meditation on touch, gender, and the value of human labor in an increasingly mechanized world.
Michala Paludan (b. 1983) is a Danish artist living and working in Copenhagen. She is a fellow of the Whitney Independent Study Program (2012) and holds an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts (2011). She studied at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts from 2005 to 2009. Paludan has exhibited widely in Scandinavia and internationally.
- Clothbound debossed hardcover with tip-in
- 21,50 × 26 cm
- 224 pages
- 101 color plates
- Texts by Lakshmi Luthra, Lars Bang Larsen and Ryan S. Jeffery
- Printed by Narayana Press
- Edition of 800
- ISBN 978-87-975274-1-2
- Published 23 October 2024
