An Elegy for the Robot
A now defunct robotic artwork couldn't help itself. Can we?
AI-enabled advanced robotic machines are on the way. What can we learn about ourselves from them? And what happens when we incorporate them into art?
The machine, in its youth, had seemed to dance.
Moving with gusto, its robotic arm seemed to shiver in delight as it went enthusiastically about its work. It had seemed to exhibit a curious pleasure as it frolicked about and swept up the oil which bled slowly from its base, as if finding purpose in even the most repetitive and perhaps even greusome of tasks.
Its rapid, smooth swipes were punctuated here and there with tricks, spins, shimmy-and-shake vibrations. Its programmers had bestowed upon these movements names which could just as easily denote dance crazes as pet tricks: “scratch an itch,” “ass shake,” “bow and shake.” It often seemed to play the eager performer, waving happily to its audience.
At times it would even point its shovel blade straight up to the sky and spin gleefully, a whirling dervish caught up in a divine ecstasy.
At other times (or to other eyes), the robot appeared confused, overwhelmed, trapped; it convulsed and shivered as if with shock as viscous liquid, presumably its petroleum lifeblood, bled from its base. It was as if its very existence centered around an open, oozing wound.
The pitiful machine, it seemed, was trying frantically to sweep its entrails back into its body. It was reminiscent of gruesome scenes in war movies; a soldier, torn upen at the gut, trying to gather up their spilled intestines. Its arm moved not with enthusiasm but with a frenzied urgency, splattering fluid all over itself and the walls of its transparent prison cell.
Museum-goers of refined taste became sadistic voyeurs, their smartphone cameras poised before their eyes, as if recording the slow death of a caged animal. The whole affair had the makings of a snuff film.
After many years, returning visitors (and social media followers) seemed to think that the machine’s movements had slowed substantially.
No longer were its movements interpreted as either frantic or jubilant; almost universally, spectators perceived it as fatigued, exhausted. Perhaps its gears were mucked up from the goo it had been splattering over itself and its glass prison for half a decade. Perhaps this was normal wear-and-tear, or maybe, somewhere deep in its algorithmic processing, a command had excuted, activating a slow deterioration analogous to the organic process of aging written into our DNA. Maybe it was planned obsolescence, designed into the machine by its creators with all the brutality of artistic foresight; absent Gods plotting fate out in advance.
Or perhaps, deep in its perceptual circuitry, a glimmer of sentience had arose, and with it a weariness with time itself, a dawning realization that its mission was intentionally crafted for futility.
At least, these are the kinds of affective states, attitudes, and interpretations which viewers and commentators, online and off, have tended to project upon the robotic arm which stands at the center of Sun Yuan and Peng Yu’s now defunct installation for the Guggenheim Museum, Can’t Help Myself (2016-2019).
Whatever Can’t Help Myself was, it is no more; as one commentator puts it “In the end, the robot couldn’t help itself” (Hampsink). After years of frantically splattering black liquid all over the walls its acrylic enclosure as well as itself, the robot’s movements gradually slowed—whether from planned obsolescence, wear-and-tear, or some form of digital exhaustion—until eventually its plug was pulled in 2019.
But that hasn’t stopped people from talking and speculating about what it all meant ever since. Indeed, the artwork lives a curious afterlife as an ongoing viral media sensation.
Cugurullo calls the all-too-human tendency to ascribe sentience, personality, or indeed even a soul to machines the “animistic tendency”: we pity the poor machine as one would an animal, or perhaps another human, even though we might know (or perhaps better said, that we presume to know) that it is not in fact alive. Far from a self-sufficient organism, a robot is a mere assemblage of metal, wires, code, signals, and electrical flows. (But then again, what is a human if not a mere assemblage of flesh, arteries, nerves, and neuro-chemical electric shocks which keep the whole body moving?)
Like machines and men, even artwork must eventually expire; all falls eventually silent in this mortal coil. If “code is law,” as some programmers like to say, it remains written by man (or increasingly—and what might be the same—his stochastic software). But it is entropy, not code, which is the unauthored and inevitable rule of this universe. There are no if-then conditionals, no exceptions, no escapes; sooner or later, everything ends. All else is prologue.
No doubt, it is easy to object that such sentimental and pathos-filled interpretations of Can’t Help Myself are mis-readings at best, delusions at worst. After all, this is nothing more than a robotic arm, an assemblage of sensors, coded instructions, and physical hydraulics systems not dissimilar to the ones which one may find on the assembly line of an automobile factory.
Likewise, one might object that such anthropomorphizing reactions would, at first blush, seem to conflict with the much more heady interpretation elaborated on the exhibition’s didactic panel: “the robot’s endless, repetitive dance,” writes exhibition curator Xiaoyu Weng, “presents an absurd Sisyphean view of contemporary issues surrounding migration and sovereignty… the bloodstain-like marks that accumulate around it evoke the violence that results from surveilling and guarding border zones.”
To be sure, it is easy to project socio-political analogies upon this particular artwork: What is a prison, a factory, or even a school if not an enforced repetition of movement, a routinized capture of time? What is a border if not the cruel attempt to immobilize human movement? What is a Nation if not the orchestration of a mass illusion, the spectacular construction of a artificial super-identities in order to squeeze some sense of drama from the rag of otherwise mundane differences?
So too are individuals often rendered as serialized, undifferentiated masses in the funhouse mirror of technology—surveillance systems, statistical regressions, legal definitions all consort to partake in the alchemy of categorization, inventing us and them: “respectable citizens” vs. “dangerous classes”; “natives” vs. “invaders.” Ironic, is it not, that in our age technology facilitates the free flow of capital (and those who command it) frictionlessly across nearly any border, but restrains the bodies of those whose collective labor produces and maintains it? Why not project any of this upon such an artwork?
Yet, and perhaps unforgivably, the plights of such populations rarely evoke the same affective or emotional responses as those invoked by Can’t Help Myself.
A common sentiment expressed in social media commentary under videos of the artwork is one of intense identification: “I can’t help but seeing myself in it.” Readings of Can’t Help Myself which anthropomorphize the robotic arm at its center are not intrinsically divorced from the headier interpretations penned by anointed commentators like Weng; they merely register the affective feelings produced by subjects living under similar socio-technological structures of governance. In this sense, viewers perhaps can’t help but see themselves in the robot. Whether to help oneself might mean to break with pre-programmed compulsions or sustain their own life autonomously, viewers can relate.
Although apocryphal, Stalin supposedly quipped that one death is a tragedy, a million a statistic (the quote probably in fact originates with Kurt Tucholsky). Does the unfeeling, completely illusory plight of this hunk of junk elicit more emotional identification than the mass murder of faceless millions? And if so, what does it say about those of us who pride ourselves on the presumed superiority of carbon-based life over silicon-based automation?
Such over-identified readings also throw the regimes of biopolitical or disciplinary governmentality to which we habitually and blindly submit into stark relief: when we compulsively return to the same workplaces and perform the same tasks week in and week out, what to call this other than an automated behavioral pattern? Are we too playing out Can’t Help Myself’s drama of Sisyphean absurdity?
Is not the “eerie satisfaction” which, according to Weng, viewers often report analogous not only to the vague sense of catharsis provoked in the course of watching a Greek tragedy run its course, but also the voyeuristic sense of pleasure we get from swiping endlessly through social media feeds? Will the young people who today giddily perform the pre-choreographed dance trends to rack up likes on social media one day wake up exhausted, fatigued, and disillusioned?
There are, no doubt, any number of tension between these competing interpretations. Is a heady critique of technological surveillance, exploitation, and the expungement of unwanted human others at odds with a deep sense of intense identification? Does the fact that viewers almost universally say “I see myself” when they watch this machine toil run up against the apparent disgust many of those same viewers show to human others who violate completely imaginary national borders—others who no doubt also see themselves in this machine?
Whatever the case may be, it is clear that the artwork seems designed to function by provoking us to throw up and flip through a series of anthropomorphic projections: human, machine; self, other; victim, perpetrator.
But Can’t Help Myself is not literally a “poor player” strutting its moment upon the stage (as per Shakespeare’s Hamlet); it is an assemblage of sensors and signals, coded instructions and training data, statistical feedback loops and physical hydraulics systems. It is trained to do one thing and one thing only and, compelled by its programming, it literally can’t help itself: it is designed to perform compulsively in the face of its human onlookers.
Its purpose is not to sustain itself; it is to entertain and, at best, to inspire.
It is, in other words, not simply an AI-enabled robotic arm, but one conceived of and elevated to the status of an artwork. We therefore cannot discount the role played by institutions of high culture in its conception and elevation. It was commissioned by a museum to occupy a pair of career artists, intended for placement within the artistic frame of an exhibition space. Insofar as it is a one-off object erected to fill a specific space for a specific time frame, it has been imbued with an “aura” in the words of Walter Benjamin.
Yet this aura was destined in our networked age to endlessly beget its own mechanical reproduction. In this age of the camera phone and the social media feed, which subsumes all culture ultimately within the futile logic of the addictive doomscroll (another way in which we increasingly can’t help ourselves), it was destined, perhaps even intended, that the robot would find a kind of spectral existence circulating endlessly through the hypermediated empire of The Spectacle.
The artwork lives a double, yet equally compulsive, afterlife; long after it has ceased to move, its digital mediation repeats endlessly the same tasks over and over on countless social media feeds. I circulates ad infinitum, or at least as long as there are signals to send and receive, eyes to see, and fingers to swipe. Indeed, the robot arm becomes in this sense an allegory for an evermore pervasive “swipe logic.”
And so, the whirling dervish, the Sisyphean worker, the tragic player, and the heady political allegory are swallowed into the mauling void of the commercial internet.
Perceived of as a self-propelling agent, Can’t Help Myself was less an autonomous artwork than a compulsion machine. Doomed to perform for others and encouraged to swipe endlessly, its mirrors nothing so much as our own digital compulsions. Perhaps we are ourselves trapped between a series of glass blocks, surrounded by them, immersed daily in a vast, repetitive machine fueled on an endless suction of our attention, curated images, and rote activities. More than a kitschy cliché of being “cogs in the machines,” we have become the raw materials upon which our technologies rely.
It has of course always been true that repetitive human labor is necessary to the production and maintenance of all technological systems. Remove all the scientists, engineers, maintenance workers, repair people, and yes everyday users on the planet, and our technologies will simply cease to function. Society is a vast machine upon which most of us rely in order to live, but which relies upon us just as much for its perpetuation.
And yet, what we have seemed to lose recently is the sense that this machine works not to constrain but rather to enhance our individual human autonomy.
Increasingly habituated to a world defined by the imperative of connection and the figure of the prosumer, all that was autonomous about humanity melts into air; increasingly it is we, not our machines, who cannot help ourselves. Right up to the end, Can’t Help Myself couldn’t break its compulsions; can we?
By: Lee A. Flamand
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