Final Project - Maggie Roberts

For this project I am expanding on my class presentation about creative coding, looking at expressive programming through Sun Yuan and Peng Yu’s installation “Can’t Help Myself” (2016). Commissioned for the Guggenheim Museum in New York City, the pair of artists built an industrial robot, armed with plastic brush strokes, emulating both a shovel and a paintbrush, at the end of the artificial limb. Secured at the center of a tank, the machine is surrounded by censors and blood-like liquid fills the space. As the red goo oozes closer to the censors, the robot is programmed to contain the substance, frantically pushing it back into place. The whole process is messy and ineffective leaving violent streaks of red across the room and splattering it on the walls, staining the once untainted surface. The robot’s movements are dramatic and overemphasized, being coded with thirty-two unique motions, all with different names, including “scratch an itch,” “bow and shake,” and “ass shake” (Weng, 2016). The digital performance walks the line between choreography and function, absurd and mundane, creative and industrial. By existing in all of these realms and never entirely committing to one, “Can’t Help Myself” mobilizes theories of “the digital” to comment on the reductive view of technology as a purely functional tool and, I would also argue, critiques labor practices within these same technology-based industrial fields.

Some theoretical texts and authors that I will be drawing upon to ground my close reading of this artwork are Wendy Chun, Lisa Nakamura, Alexander R. Galloway and Kara Keeling, among others. I am interested in the way Yuan and Yu’s piece stakes a claim for humanities scholarship within the digital through affect theory specifically. Creative coding is both a practical tool and ephemeral exercise which oscillates between functional, social and cultural paradigms. It is this interdisciplinary quality of the multimedia artform which opens-up new generative avenues for contemporary and experimental art, film and video which I feel deserves serious critical study.

Here is a video clip of the exhibit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nX6C6xY86-c