I don’t think any piece of art has ever emotionally affected me the way this robot arm piece has affected me. It’s called “Can’t Help Myself” and it’s a robot arm that’s programmed to clean up the fluid that’s constantly leaking out of itself, that looked like a never ending flow of blood. It has programmed dance moves to make it appear to have human gestures. And at first, it seemed happy and proud of its job, dancing around when it had visitors. But three years later, it looks tired, hopeless, and like it’s living in a never ending cycle of constantly trying to put itself back together for the entertainment of other people. And when I found out that it had finally stopped working in 2019, essentially dying, I couldn’t help but imagine the relief it must’ve felt and so I’ve been in here crying over a robot arm. 🥺 It was programmed this way, it truly couldn’t help itself. And no one ever helped him, they just watched.

In this work commissioned for the Guggenheim Museum, Sun Yuan & Peng Yu employ an industrial robot, visual-recognition sensors, and software systems to examine our increasingly automated global reality, one in which territories are controlled mechanically and the relationship between people and machines is rapidly changing. Placed behind clear acrylic walls, their robot has one specific duty, to contain a viscous, deep-red liquid within a predetermined area. When the sensors detect that the fluid has strayed too far, the arm frenetically shovels it back into place, leaving smudges on the ground and splashes on the surrounding walls.

Sun Yuan & Peng Yu are known for using dark humor to address contentious topics, and the robot’s endless, repetitive dance presents an absurd, Sisyphean view of contemporary issues surrounding migration and sovereignty. However, the bloodstain-like marks that accumulate around it evoke the violence that results from surveilling and guarding border zones. Such visceral associations call attention to the consequences of authoritarianism guided by certain political agendas that seek to draw more borders between places and cultures and to the increasing use of technology to monitor our environment.