Can't Help Myself by Sun Yuan and Peng Yu (2021)
loosetooth.com
loosetooth.com
My co-worker called me upset a few weeks ago with a story. I didn't understand why she was so upset at first. She said she found a 1-foot-long lizard in her office when she walked in that morning. It took her 20 minutes to gently coax the lizard out the door and then herd it down the hallway, past the other offices, and out the front door of the building. She sat down on the curb and watched it while it stood on the sidewalk. I was like - this is a great story. Why are you upset?
And then she told me that as she was sitting there, a few seconds later, a crow flew down and grabbed the lizard, turned it over and ripped its belly out while it struggled. Somehow, the crow left the entire heart of the lizard laying in the grass, which she took a photo of, which I have, which is both awesome and very disgusting.
The reason this art piece makes me think of that story is that we don't expect gore and guts and blood to suddenly spout out around us and mess up our nice clean antiseptic reality, but really, isn't our blood and guts what built the machines? The pathos comes from our projection of our own loneliness and fear of death. Onto the broken machine, the struggling lizard, the abandoned toy: That will be us one day.
I live in Hong Kong. Sometimes sparrows make nests in odd places. There's a footbridge about 10 minutes from my home. The footbridge has draining holes for the rain.
I think a pair of sparrows once made a nest in one of those holes. One afternoon, as I passed under the footbridge, I saw a baby sparrow on the pavement. I guess it fell from the nest. It was still alive and chirping, it had no idea that there's no way for its parents to rescue them. There was another young woman close-by, watching it, not knowing what to do about it. I'm a nerd. I would have no problem taking it home and trying to raise it. My kids would have loved the experience, even though my wife might have objected. However, I was on an errand and I couldn't just scoop up the little thing and walk home. I didn't have a proper container to put it in. I was still looking around, trying to find something to safeguard the baby sparrow until I can make my way home, when suddenly a man walked by. The man was looking at his phone, he wasn't paying attention to the pavement. Squish! The baby sparrow was dead, its brain and guts all spilled out. The young woman who was watching gave a sharp gasp. I was utterly heart-broken.
Will note, even with this kind of mindset, sometimes nihilism, still can't overcome stuff like social anxiety/talking to the hot girl, things like that. So idk...
This also happens when you see some animal get eaten by another animal, you remember I could be on that menu too... like an alligator eating a Cheetah in Africa.
How would it even work? Hydraulic fluid would need to be under pressure. It just scooping it back in wouldn't keep going. Perhaps if it was a lubricant, without which the mechanical system would overheat... but this wouldn't quite tell the same story...
Then anyway we find out the robot is purely electrical, there's no hydraulics. Rather than contributing to the story as the post suggests, this feels like failure in execution. It was clearly just easier to build this way and then have a pool of fluid.
I guess for me the execution matters in this instance. The idea that's the artist is trying to express gets confused by the inconsistent engineering, for me at least.
I feel more pathos for those boxes that switch themselves off (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3KTilOsXBmU). While going for a completely different emotion, they seem to express it using engineering quite well.
I can't even see the post.
If you don’t have Javascript enabled, you can download the video using youtube-dl.
There are also many videos of the artwork at YouTube, e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iicUX7CpYfo