The Guggenheim’s first robotic artwork: The Guggenheim Museum’s first robotic artwork is an enormous arm “brandishing a giant squeegee, is poised over a pool of dark liquid which ceaselessly oozes outwards. With quick, smooth, aggressive movements, the machine performs a calculated dance, pivoting and dragging its squeegee across the surface in a perpetual labor of wiping the liquid back to the center.” The piece, by artists Sun Yuan and Peng Yu, is called “Can’t Help Myself.” The idea behind it is quite radical and provocative, but open to interpretation. “The image confronts us with issues surrounding what the artists call the ‘pleasure and panic’ of anticipating the future,” Azura Wannmann writes for The Creators Project. The artists say that “only in the accidents of a computer glitch, a power failure or losing a cellphone can we realize that we are kidnapped by today’s knowledge structure … The stronger such sense of dependence feels, the stronger the feelings of panic and pleasure it brings. The most frightening part is that no matter how we reflect on it, it cannot be stopped… At the same time fears are exciting, for the knowledge beyond our experience is coming.” Wannmann adds, “The dynamics of human/machine relationships sparks an important dialogue about the future of art: how can technology and robotics take the place of the artist and extend or replicate their will?”

When asked about how the idea of the robotic arm came about, Sun said, “An artist’s work is a reflection of her will, the artist doesn’t need to be present on-site, physically. Instead, you rely on an agent to carry out your will… This is my agent, it has limitless endurance… all you need to provide it with is your will… The difference between machines and humans is that even if machines develop a new calculating capacity that exceeds their original settings, those calculations will still be based on the logic programmed by humans. They are incapable of performing any task that is beyond human experience (runtime 05:57).” Wannmann complements Sun’s vision by noting that “Can’t Help Myself questions the place of the machine in humanity’s grand narrative and explores what robotic artist Bill Vorn calls the aesthetics of artificial behaviors. As machines learn and respond to more information and technology advances, human/machine relationships become increasingly complex.”

Can’t Help Myself is part of the Tales of Our Time exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, where artists from China “challenge the conventional understanding of place. By portraying often-overlooked cultural and historical narratives … Their artworks address specific locations, such as their hometowns, remote borderlands, or a group of uninhabited islands, as well as abstract ideas, such as territory, boundaries, or even utopia. China, too, is presented here, not only as a country but also as a notion that is open for questioning and reinvention.”