Can't Help Myself
A robot art piece mirrors the human condition.
In 2016, the Guggenheim Museum commissioned its very first robotic art piece titled Can’t Help Myself.
The artwork is created by two of China’s most controversial artists Sun Yuan and Peng Yu. They programmed the robot to continually attempt to contain hydraulic fluid constantly leaking out of itself. If too much of the hydraulic fluid were to escape, the robot would die.
The robot continuously brings the liquid back into place over and over again through a calculated sweeping of the floor, without it ever seeming to stop.
As the hydraulic leak got worse over the years, each moment proved to be a fight for self-preservation. However, it wasn’t always this way. One feature of this robot is that it was programmed with ‘happy dances.’ If the spill was at a point where it was contained, the robot would spend its time interacting with spectators and performing dances. Because the spill was easy to contain in the early stages of its life, this was often what observers of the art would witness.
As time went on, the happy dances become fewer and fewer. The spill grew overtime, making the leaked fluid unmanageable. There was never enough time to dance, only enough time to keep itself alive. Even through the night, when nobody was watching, all it did was attempt to keep itself together.
The robot lived its last days in a hopeless cycle between sustaining life and bleeding out, eventually coming to a halt and dying in 2019.
The ultimate twist in this story is that the robot ran on electricity, not hydraulics. The duration of its life was spent working towards something it didn’t need, buying into a system it was brought into.
Can’t Help Myself casts a powerful reflection on the human condition.
What do you see within the art that mirrors your own experience?
I can’t help but feel the cries of the boy inside, the one who loved to dance and play but has since lost his innocence.
Being brought into a system designed to destroy the human spirit leaves one feeling hopeless and lost, as we work our lives away in self-preservation while simultaneously accomplishing nothing of spiritual value.
Who have we become? What is this life we have chosen for ourselves?
How do we escape the trap of our system sustaining life while we are simultaneously bleeding out from it?
Only you can find that answer, but it starts with having hope.
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this goes beyond my comprehension. most individual living things on this earth are focusd on (and often good at) finding an equilibrium to live life in some form of harmony, ultimately in tune with the vibrations of the universe. so then I find myself asking 'why, what is the reason to exhibit a system (machine) designed for losing against its own limitations'? car engines are designed to do that (so that we'll buy a newer, more expensive one, keeping us enslaved to an over-arching consumerist system) and because life is finite people, plants and animals eventually die too. but should we enjoy watching their death throes too, like the machine in a museum?