Thinking with Things

He says “as long as I remember myself I remember myself dancing.”

​

Oh, I like this prompt, I think. And so I think ‘as long as I remember myself I remember myself ............’ waiting. Listening. Watching. Hesitating. .... unsure. Unsureness was my first inbetween. My awkward connections. Connectors of my mouth and my brain, my heart and my brain, my brain-heart-mouth. And all of these to my hands. My right hand. My writing hand. And we are taught to hide this ‘mess’. To shed and always be shedding. Insecurity. Fragility. Vulnerability. Shed. Hide.

​

This continuous life-long action of shedding makes me think of an installation that I can only ever remember to name as The Blood Robot. Artists Sun Yuan and Peng Yu’s installation ‘Can’t Help Myself’ is a tall industrial matt black and chrome arm that is, as described by Xiao-yu Weng (2016), ‘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 of the robot frenetically shovels it back into place, leaving smudges on the ground and splashes on the surrounding walls’ (2016). I always recall the awkward movements around the shovelling of the blood liquid. ‘[...] the robot’s endless, repetitive dance’. This juice, this rot-waste, that is needing to be hidden, has no place to go. It is kept from bleeding out - yet pulled, placed nowhere else. It is the machine’s programming, its hidden-curriculum, to need to contain this, but it has no place to put what it is so systemically and desperately pre-determined to hold back.