Antarctique
Rattrapante R.U.R - Tribute to Karel Capek
ONCE WERE ROBOTS…
Will robots rule all our lives one day? Or will Czapek’s Rare People escape that fate? Might the answer be found in Czapek & Cie’s new Antarctique Rattrapante ‘R.U.R.’, where a robot adds a playful animation to the mechanics revealed beneath the grey-metallised sapphire dial? As the chronograph function is activated, the robot’s eyes change colour: press start, the eyes turn yellow (recalling Shrike in the movie Mortal Engines). Stop: they turn red. And on reset they turn blue.
TRIBUTE TO KAREL CAPEK
The Czapek team’s discovery that the word robot had been introduced to the wider world exactly a century earlier by another man called Capek (with the Czech spelling), made the rattrapante-with-robot idea irresistible. A prominent Czech intellectual, Karel Capek was deeply concerned about the scientific materialism that emerged in the early 20th century. His play, R.U.R. – Rossum’s Universal Robots, about mechanical men that were built to work on factory assembly lines but that rebel against their human masters, was a critique of the dehumanising potential of science and technology.
