Crying Over a Robot Arm

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.

The meme is a long emotional reflection on the robotic art installation “Can’t Help Myself,” which repeatedly cleans up leaking red fluid while performing humanlike dances. The writer interprets the machine’s endless task as exhaustion and suffering, then cries over it after learning that it stopped working in 2019. It is used as an absurdly sincere reaction to feeling empathy for an object or becoming emotionally overwhelmed by art.

• @eternalclassic / 2910 2021-11-10