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“Automaton” workshop

June 12, 20256:00 p.m.

CORDOBA

Casa Árabe headquarters (at Calle Samuel de los Santos y Gener, 9). 6:00 p.m. 4 euros for the general public at the headquarters.

3 euros: tickets purchased online, the officially unemployed, Casa Árabe Language Center students and Youth Card holders. Ticket sales on this website or at Casa Árabe’s headquarters in Cordoba (in cash or by credit card).

In Spanish.

On Thursday, June 12, a new workshop will be hosted along with SextoMario at our headquarters in Cordoba. We will be creating an “automaton” inspired by the historical figure Abbas Ibn Firnas, a forefather of aeronautics. Sign up before places run out!

The world of Al-Andalus brought back from the classical world the development of “automatons,” various mechanical devices and contraptions which performed movements through a system of gears, wheels and pulleys that came to be highly valued by the upper classes of that time period.

Among other scientists contemporary to Al-Andalus, we will be discussing the Banu Musa brothers, as well as al-Jazari, who was amongst the greatest engineers in history. Inventor of the crankshaft and the first mechanical clocks moved by weights and water, in addition to many other automatically controlled inventions, he was also very interested in the figure of the automaton, creating a work with the title “The book of knowledge of ingenious mechanisms,” considered one of the most important in the history of technology.

At this workshop, we will be reproducing an automaton based on the work by this forefather of aeronautics, Abbas Ibn Firnas.  

Photo: Recreation of the wings devised by Ibn Firnas, which he tested himself in 875. Photograph of a monument to Arab inventors at the Ibn Battuta Mall in Dubai (United Arab Emirates) on June 2, 2007.