“Can’t Help Myself”
Maybe it’s cheating to include a robot that was built for the explicit purpose of demonstrating futility. “Can’t Help Myself” is an art piece by Sun Yuan and Peng Yu, commissioned for the Guggenheim Museum. It’s an industrial robot that sits in the middle of a pool of gooey, blood-like red liquid. It’s equipped with a big scraping tool and visual recognition sensors and is charged with the impossible task of cleaning up the goop. As the liquid inevitably seeps towards the walls, the robot frantically moves to try and contain it, a task which could never be completed. It ran for years at various exhibitions until 2019, when it ran out of hydraulic fluid and slowly died.
