KBC Brick Laser Robot

13/09/2013 | Installations, Robots

In the summer of 2013 TBWA in Brussels had come up with a campaign for KBC Bank, to make people aware of local real-estate investments the bank is doing, with the help of your savings in their bank. To demonstrate this, they wanted to ask people, on a campaign website, to enter a personal message, for one of the real-estate projects. That message would then be physically embedded into the building. At this point I was called in.

Doing one’s bit translates to Dutch as “een steentje bijdragen”, which means as much as “to contribute your little stone”.I translated this idea very directly in a system that would take a personal message and engrave this directly into a brick. This brick could then be physically embedded into a building, with the message forever a part of the project.

I took inspiration from Joe Davis, whom I met last year at Ars Electronica. He told us about a project where he stamped his DNA code into a load of pebbles. But for this campaign we needed more space than just a pebble…A lot of work went in selecting and producing the right bricks to write on. Each little brick was hand cut to ensure the smoothest possible surface to write on.

The real hero of the installation if off course the Denso robot-arm. For that part I cooperated with Jonathan Berte from RoboVision, who is really brilliant with industrial robot arms and camera systems.