Sun Yuan & Peng Yu 孙原 & 彭禹
Can’t Help Myself 难自禁
2016–2019

What is it about watch­ing robots do their work that’s so sooth­ing and dis­turb­ing at the same time? Even though this machine doesn’t look like a humanoid, I see the point­less work it’s doing and can iden­ti­fy with it. There’s a shared expe­ri­ence through action and behav­ior.

I also get the impres­sion this robot is embar­rassed or ashamed. Maybe it spilled or killed some­thing and it’s des­per­ate­ly try­ing to clean up the mess or evi­dence. There real­ly is a sweet feel­ing in the futil­i­ty of this robot try­ing to clean up the mess.

I was mes­mer­ized when I first saw this clip—would love to see it close up. Bril­liant piece of work.

Guggen­heim: 

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. The idea to use a robot came from the artists’ ini­tial wish to test what could pos­si­bly replace an artist’s will in mak­ing a work and how could they do so with a machine. They mod­i­fied a robot­ic arm, one often seen on pro­duc­tion lines such as those in car man­u­fac­tur­ing, by installing a cus­tom-designed shov­el to its front. Col­lab­o­rat­ing with two robot­ics engi­neers, Sun Yuan & Peng Yu designed a series of thir­ty-two move­ments for machine to per­form. Their names for these move­ments, such as “scratch an itch,” “bow and shake,” and “ass shake,” reflect the artists’ inten­tion to ani­mate a machine. Observed from the cage-like acrylic par­ti­tions that iso­late it in the gallery space, the machine seems to acquire con­scious­ness and meta­mor­phose into a life-form that has been cap­tured and con­fined in the space. At the same time, for view­ers the poten­tial­ly eerie sat­is­fac­tion of watch­ing the robot’s con­tin­u­ous action elic­its a sense of voyeurism and excite­ment, as opposed to thrills or sus­pense. In this case, who is more vul­ner­a­ble: the human who built the machine or the machine who is con­trolled by a human? 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

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