Early morning in late June, Peter gives the Arnot forest a haircut. We tag potential ash tree candidates deep in the forest to be felled and chopped up. By the dying light of that same day we stack a mountain of odd, misshapen ash tree logs in the warehouse.

And so begins the carry-mount-scan-script-upload-cut process: there are 56 individual logs to cut and after some procedural refinement we are cutting about 5 or more a day. It is automated. A factory line assembly Ford would be proud of. At some point I become one with the machine. I am but a cog, a forklift and a current that turns on a switch; at some point, the buzzing saw and high-octane work is reduced to a peaceful hum.

The tranquil surface of the lake within my inner sanctum is broken when the saw hits a screw, or the curve is too great, or the wood is slightly too fat, or the design changes and I have to force-fit a new curve onto an already chosen log! The internal alarm rings, and we follow protocol to zero the machine and run diagnostics. Every problem is a new one which we don’t know how long it will take to fix. It is then that I am reminded that this isn’t (yet) an industrial process but one involving best guesses and probablys, and that, even to the robots, to err is human …

We put googly eyes on Kuka’s analogical face and wave at it as it continues to slice by.

— Byungchan Ahn [Wood Team Member, M.Arch ‘21 at Cornell AAP]