Can't Help Myself by Sun Yuan and Peng Yu (2021)(loosetooth.com)
loosetooth.com
Can't Help Myself by Sun Yuan and Peng Yu (2021)
https://www.loosetooth.com/blog/can-t-help-myself-by-sun-yuan-peng-yu
8 comments
I had a similar experience myself a few years back.
I live in Hong Kong. Sometimes sparrows make nests in odd places. There's a footbridge about 10 minutes from my home. The footbridge has draining holes for the rain.
I think a pair of sparrows once made a nest in one of those holes. One afternoon, as I passed under the footbridge, I saw a baby sparrow on the pavement. I guess it fell from the nest. It was still alive and chirping, it had no idea that there's no way for its parents to rescue them. There was another young woman close-by, watching it, not knowing what to do about it. I'm a nerd. I would have no problem taking it home and trying to raise it. My kids would have loved the experience, even though my wife might have objected. However, I was on an errand and I couldn't just scoop up the little thing and walk home. I didn't have a proper container to put it in. I was still looking around, trying to find something to safeguard the baby sparrow until I can make my way home, when suddenly a man walked by. The man was looking at his phone, he wasn't paying attention to the pavement. Squish! The baby sparrow was dead, its brain and guts all spilled out. The young woman who was watching gave a sharp gasp. I was utterly heart-broken.
I live in Hong Kong. Sometimes sparrows make nests in odd places. There's a footbridge about 10 minutes from my home. The footbridge has draining holes for the rain.
I think a pair of sparrows once made a nest in one of those holes. One afternoon, as I passed under the footbridge, I saw a baby sparrow on the pavement. I guess it fell from the nest. It was still alive and chirping, it had no idea that there's no way for its parents to rescue them. There was another young woman close-by, watching it, not knowing what to do about it. I'm a nerd. I would have no problem taking it home and trying to raise it. My kids would have loved the experience, even though my wife might have objected. However, I was on an errand and I couldn't just scoop up the little thing and walk home. I didn't have a proper container to put it in. I was still looking around, trying to find something to safeguard the baby sparrow until I can make my way home, when suddenly a man walked by. The man was looking at his phone, he wasn't paying attention to the pavement. Squish! The baby sparrow was dead, its brain and guts all spilled out. The young woman who was watching gave a sharp gasp. I was utterly heart-broken.
You and my friend with the lizard would have a lot in common. Every animal has a purpose, she says. She makes me realize the fragility of life. When we were living together, in New Zealand, she rescued a little green bird that accidentally crashed into our window. I remember it sat in her hand shaking. One day it was strong enough and flew away. It's so beautiful. And then it's gone. I think this is why I can't sleep. I still don't know what this all is. It's over too fast.
Oh, so terrible! :( I hope you learned something: next time pick up the sparrow :(
It's so confusing to me as a piece of art using engineering principals to express something.
How would it even work? Hydraulic fluid would need to be under pressure. It just scooping it back in wouldn't keep going. Perhaps if it was a lubricant, without which the mechanical system would overheat... but this wouldn't quite tell the same story...
Then anyway we find out the robot is purely electrical, there's no hydraulics. Rather than contributing to the story as the post suggests, this feels like failure in execution. It was clearly just easier to build this way and then have a pool of fluid.
I guess for me the execution matters in this instance. The idea that's the artist is trying to express gets confused by the inconsistent engineering, for me at least.
I feel more pathos for those boxes that switch themselves off (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3KTilOsXBmU). While going for a completely different emotion, they seem to express it using engineering quite well.
How would it even work? Hydraulic fluid would need to be under pressure. It just scooping it back in wouldn't keep going. Perhaps if it was a lubricant, without which the mechanical system would overheat... but this wouldn't quite tell the same story...
Then anyway we find out the robot is purely electrical, there's no hydraulics. Rather than contributing to the story as the post suggests, this feels like failure in execution. It was clearly just easier to build this way and then have a pool of fluid.
I guess for me the execution matters in this instance. The idea that's the artist is trying to express gets confused by the inconsistent engineering, for me at least.
I feel more pathos for those boxes that switch themselves off (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3KTilOsXBmU). While going for a completely different emotion, they seem to express it using engineering quite well.
Appreciating art often requires suspension of disbelief.
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Weird tangent but every now and then I will watch human gore video to remind myself I am fragile. Life currently is not bad. I need to try harder.
Mm. Friend of mine had the entire "Traces of Death" series on video for exactly this reason. Totally not a serial killer. He just liked to be reminded that we're all made of goo.
Yeah it's really weird, just so abstracted from it, which is not a bad thing, but when you see it, can't really comprehend it haha. But yeah I know biology works against EMP but I would like to be an electrical being if possible... probably not in our life time.
Will note, even with this kind of mindset, sometimes nihilism, still can't overcome stuff like social anxiety/talking to the hot girl, things like that. So idk...
This also happens when you see some animal get eaten by another animal, you remember I could be on that menu too... like an alligator eating a Cheetah in Africa.
Will note, even with this kind of mindset, sometimes nihilism, still can't overcome stuff like social anxiety/talking to the hot girl, things like that. So idk...
This also happens when you see some animal get eaten by another animal, you remember I could be on that menu too... like an alligator eating a Cheetah in Africa.
I want to see the picture
So this was found and photographed 1-2 days later and assumed to be the heart of said lizard, if nothing else happened to have its heart ripped out in the same area:
https://ibb.co/sQTvwzV
https://ibb.co/sQTvwzV
Why is this pushed to the hn frontpage with just 3 points? Due to the high karma of the submitter, upvoters or whatever? What is the mechanism here?
Not many upvotes are needed to get to the front page. But if it doesn't keep getting more, it won't stay for long.
From the first few seconds, I interpreted it as us being slaves to the machine. The arm pulling in our blood, sweat, and tears for its maintenance. The machine is using us, not the other way around. If it were the other way around, we’d have 20 hour work weeks by now. And don’t blame this entirely on the rich either. They also work insane hours.
>I stopped in my tracks when I saw this Instagram Post shared by a friend via Facebook:
I can't even see the post.
I can't even see the post.
Try this URL: https://www.instagram.com/p/CWEdy59hgHB/
If you don’t have Javascript enabled, you can download the video using youtube-dl.
There are also many videos of the artwork at YouTube, e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iicUX7CpYfo
If you don’t have Javascript enabled, you can download the video using youtube-dl.
There are also many videos of the artwork at YouTube, e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iicUX7CpYfo
this is super cool! I've always been curious about the orientation of the earth/sun relative to the universe it's so fascinating! now I'm super curious about whats the edge of the universe
This is good. Would love to see more of these types of stories on HN :)
Exhibit A in "Machines vs Humanity"
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My co-worker called me upset a few weeks ago with a story. I didn't understand why she was so upset at first. She said she found a 1-foot-long lizard in her office when she walked in that morning. It took her 20 minutes to gently coax the lizard out the door and then herd it down the hallway, past the other offices, and out the front door of the building. She sat down on the curb and watched it while it stood on the sidewalk. I was like - this is a great story. Why are you upset?
And then she told me that as she was sitting there, a few seconds later, a crow flew down and grabbed the lizard, turned it over and ripped its belly out while it struggled. Somehow, the crow left the entire heart of the lizard laying in the grass, which she took a photo of, which I have, which is both awesome and very disgusting.
The reason this art piece makes me think of that story is that we don't expect gore and guts and blood to suddenly spout out around us and mess up our nice clean antiseptic reality, but really, isn't our blood and guts what built the machines? The pathos comes from our projection of our own loneliness and fear of death. Onto the broken machine, the struggling lizard, the abandoned toy: That will be us one day.