Site of the day.
“A poem begins with a lump in the throat.”
Robert Frost
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“I don’t think any piece of art has ever emotionally affected me the way this robot arm piece has affected me. It’s called “Can’t Help Myself” and it’s a robot arm that’s programmed to clean up the fluid that’s constantly leaking out of itself, that looked like a never ending flow of blood. It has programmed dance moves to make it appear to have human gestures. And at first, it seemed happy and proud of its job, dancing around when it had visitors. But three years later, it looks tired, hopeless, and like it’s living in a never ending cycle of constantly trying to put itself back together for the entertainment of other people. And when I found out that it had finally stopped working in 2019, essentially dying, I couldn’t help but imagine the relief it must’ve felt and so I’ve been in here crying over a robot arm. It was programmed this way, it truly couldn’t help itself. And no one ever helped him, they just watched.” - Mulandra Snead
About The Piece
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.
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.
All sourcing and more info about the piece here.
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“Kevin Thinking Hard” by Vanessa Stockard.
Song of the day.
- Source Spotify
Bookmark: A Collection of Items Found in Returned Library Books
The maker of the small-town installation is Ali Beaudette, who has been working in libraries since she was 15 years old. While still in high school, a colleague of hers, who was about to retire, gave her a precious collection. For 20 years, this colleague accrued ticket stubs, photos, playing cards, and more that people had left behind in their library books, presumably as bookmarks.
Beaudette kept this collection and added to it herself as she worked in six different libraries in New England since then. In 2017, once she was enrolled at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design, she made an installation out of the various collected scraps from this quirky collection of scrap material. The resulting work, Bookmark: A Collection of Items, sat in storage until this month, when the installation was exhibited at the small library she currently in Greenville, Rhode Island, where Beaudette works.
“I’ve been trying to figure it why people responded so strongly to it,” Beaudette said. “On a really human level, I think people are very drawn to the tiny details of strangers lives, especially in this weird time where we have so much distance from each other.”
Beaudette’s work is an almost archeological record of sentimentality, small moments lost to time. It’s reminiscent of recent works by artists who document everyday detritus—including Tom Kiefer, who collected rosaries left behind by ICE detainees while he worked at a border facility as a janitor—and also reminds one of the old Southern folk practice of making memory jugs, in which objects like photos, toys, spoons, and bottle caps are stuck to old pitchers with cement. These pieces all have the miraculous effect of making us achingly aware of lives lived by complete strangers.
“I’m not the only one who keeps these objects,” Beaudette said. “I saw so many comments from library workers who said, ‘Oh, we do this too.’ It makes sense. I mean, you never know what is important to someone, what they’ll come back for.” [via.]
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“Look for three things in a person–intelligence, energy and integrity. If they don’t have the last one, don’t even bother with the first two.”
Warren Buffett
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Plants Feel Pain + Might Even See
In 2018, a German newspaper asked me if I would be interested in having a conversation with the philosopher Emanuele Coccia, who had just written a book about plants, Die Wurzeln der Welt (published in English as The Life of Plants). I was happy to say yes.
The German title of Coccia’s book translates as “The Roots of the World,” and the book really does cover this. It upends our view of the living world, putting plants at the top of the hierarchy with humans down at the bottom. I had been giving a great deal of thought to this myself. Ranking the natural world and scoring species according to their importance or their superiority seemed to me outdated. It distorts our view of nature and makes all the other species around us seem more primitive and somehow unfinished. For some time now, I have not been comfortable with viewing humans as the crown of creation, separating animals into higher and lower life-forms, and treating plants as something on the side, definitively banished to a lower level.
And so I found the conversation with Coccia most refreshing when he visited our Forest Academy. A small bearded man, Coccia turned up in a blue suit and blue checkered tie, completely inappropriate attire for the outdoors, even though we had agreed that we would take a walk in the forest together. Although he is from Italy and now teaches in France and writes in French, he also speaks fluent German because at one time he studied and worked in Freiburg.
After our first cup of coffee, we were soon deep into our main topic: trees and plants in general. Coccia argued that our biological classifications are not grounded in science. They are strongly influenced by theology and are dominated by two ideas: the supremacy of the human race and the world as a place humans must bend to their will. And then there is our centuries-old compulsion to categorize everything. When you combine these concepts, you get a ranking system that puts humankind at the top, animals in the middle, and plants way down at the bottom.
I listened, fascinated by what he had to say. Here was a man of my own heart. I would prefer it, I told Coccia, if science categorized species one beside the other. That would still allow an order, a system of sorting, without imposing any kind of a hierarchy. He immediately agreed. He reiterated his belief that the ordering system we have today is not scientific but rather influenced by cultural, historical, and religious values. For Coccia, the hard boundary between the plant and animal world does not exist. He believes plants can experience sensations and even reflect on them. And he is not the only one who thinks this.
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“A4 Size Playing Card” 8-piece series by Pottering Cat. Buy them here.