Sisyphus Happy is a robot that carefully vandalises car parts
Sisyphus Happy
Sisyphus Happy is a project that takes Camus’ philosophical essay, “The Myth of Sisyphus,” as a conceptual framework to reflect on labor, existentialism and the artist's condition. The project is divided in two parts, a film and three works resulted from the filming process.
The film focuses its narrative on a factory robot, a tool for automated labor that epitomizes capitalism, and is often perceived as an anthropomorphization of technology. In this case, the robot is programmed to depict images using a burin as a drawing tool and car parts as canvases; this conflation of a high precision tool and an act of vandalism to explore the idea of purpose in purposelessness challenges the reasoning behind profitability in efficacy. The three car parts depict images that symbolise power structures related to the history of art and labor.
The project was filmed at KASK’s Black box and Formlab in August 2020. Special thanks to Elias Heuninck and Hendrik Leper.
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