A Robot To Feel Sorry For
He and thousands of others are sharing their opinion of the Robot Arm.
A work of Art
Kona Dave clued me to this Sisyphean piece of living Art.
It was commissioned by the Guggenheim Museum and is on display there.
Check out Newsweek’s take on it here.
People are saying the robot died
Did it actually die in 2019?
It didn’t die. It’s a machine (a work of art machine) it can’t die.
Come on!
It didn’t even pretend die….
People feel sorry for this thing
People on Tic Tok.
Millions and millions of people on Tic Tok.
This bleeding robot hits them where it hurts.
It reminds them of themselves.
We’re Humans. Love is what we’re all about. Lot’s of us, including me, like to think otherwise. I spend most of my day hating human beings.
Then I see something suffer, I feel bad for it.
Especially dumb animals.
A dog hit by a car and it’s still alive…that makes me feel real bad.
Maybe I won’t cry for a human.
A machine?
Yeah….that’s what it’s come to.
If I watch this thing long enough, maybe I’ll imagine it slowing down from it’s endless toil.
Poor thing.
Interpretations
Like any great work of art, can’t help myself, as the work is titled, evokes various interpretations.
The creators of this work had this in mind;
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.
Xiaoyu Weng
Roll the Rock
Yet Kricked, and millions of Tic Tok people, they see the deeper meaning of this work.
Forget Politics.
They see the robot as a living thing.
Working to get by and for no good reason than to stay alive.
Like Kafka wrote about….you bust your ass to stay alive and you don’t know why. Rich. Poor. Beautiful. Mad. It doesn’t matter how lucky or broke you are. Nobody is explaining shit! God is keeping his mouth shut. Like Sisyphus, we roll the rock uphill just to see it roll down again–and what’s the point? The point is we roll the rock or we die. That’s the only point.
We get old. The rock gets heavier. The struggle becomes harder to maintain. We grow weak and finally….we croak. So the TicToker at the top of my post came to that conclusion. The poor machine got tired and old and slowed down and finally it died.
He got it wrong...but maybe he didn’t get it wrong.
We’re all rolling that rock. And when we see a machine conducting an otherwise pointless activity just to stay alive. We empathize…
So you cry for it. Because you’re human.
Only a Human is capable of feeling sorry for a machine.
Silly Humans!
Time for a group hug.
One thought on “A Robot To Feel Sorry For”
If the derrick, mes excuses, I mean the robot were leaking oil, blood, even rusty tears in a Bakersfield field, it would be pollution. In the museum, it is art…..protected by dual guardians, one visible, the other not, of frame qua context.
Do you think a robot watching you bleed out would feel anything? Wake up and smell the terabytes before they make us an it. What vast melancholy is expoosed at seeing unchecked leakage?
We are all we have. I’m not waiting for Godot or The Second Coming. We had better start helping those no one else will; and according to Bard, ChatGPT or the prevailing Acronymic deity, it will soon be us. Either we are here for each other or we’re here for nothing. The most endangered species has one algorithm….a heartbeat, until its time leaks out.