TABOO - TRANSGRESSION - TRANSCENDENCE

Normally, robotic art would be a process or an environment. One of the ways to make an environment an aesthetically charged one is to include a conflict or a tension between the actors.

In the case of robotic art, such tension would be an explosion, a literal one. Once the destruction is implied, seemingly unlikely for robotic art, the theme of transience is evoked. Indeed, a robot may hypothetically go on forever or as long as the source of energy is provided. Yet such artists as Jean Tinguely and Survival Research Labs demonstrate dysfunctional, destroying one another, or autodestructive machines. Failure is as magnetic as success, yet failure (of a human, animal, or machine alike) causes sympathy and evokes cathartic projection; the viewer projects their vulnerable self on the vulnerable machine (or human, or animal). The other theme that goes with the destructive machines is the reverse of overproduction. Destructive machine is anti-clock and thus anti-perpetual mobile. Being drawn towards its own end, this machine neglects countable time and rejects production in order and order as such. Witnessing the destruction is a reminder of endings of various sorts, including the one of the life of the observer. A broader vision of the end of technocratic civilisation or Western civilisation is equally possible

The spectacle of destruction of Survival Research Labs is a familiar one: it is spread by the news. Yet literal destruction is rarely made the material of an artwork; rather, the artwork points at it. Destruction and failure is oftentimes used for the comic effect. In Tinguely and SRL works, destruction is both apocalyptic and comic in its pointlessness. It is a critique of war as an economy of destruction. The spectacle is aimed to show the consequences of violence and imbue horror, yet it also excites, the way pyrotechnic special effects excite in films. The excitement grinds into memory. It is hard to imagine the exact properties of noise, the smell, and this comic pointlessness of destruction when watching the video footage from the news. The spectacle is the chance to experience a glimpse of destruction without a trauma.