Scribit: A Way for Robotics to Save Museums after COVID-19

As nearly 90% of museums had to close their doors in the last two months because of COVID-19 (data by UNESCO), cultural institutions and curators worldwide are striving to experiment with new ways to engage with the public. In response, write & erase robot Scribit is unveiling a project that allows unprecedented access to one of Italy’s leading museums – the Museo Egizio in Turin, which has recently reopened after the shutdown. 

Using Scribit, people will be able to reproduce some of the museum’s masterpieces directly onto their walls. The first exhibit available on Scribit’s app, starting from June 10th, will be a rare example of decorative wood burial endowment made with colored glass paste, discovered in middle-Egypt, and dating back more than 2,300 years.

The first exhibit available with Scribit from the Museo Egizio’s collection is a fragment of the Sarcophagus of Djedthotiuefankh, a rare example of decorative wood burial endowment, made with colored glass paste to obtain the inlaid figures from the “Book of the Dead”. 

This is part of the burial goods of Thot Djedthotiuefankh, brother of Petosiri, to whom the Tuna el-Gebel temple in middle-Egypt was dedicated in the IV century BC. The original testimony of the burial tradition is part of the collection by Bernardino Drovetti (1824), explorer and antiquities collector, to which most of the Museum’s 40,000 exhibits belong.