We don’t often think of machines as mortal, and yet — they do break down. Their motors stutter, their servers shut off, their code becomes obsolete. Some artists have noticed this strange form of mechanical fragility and treated it not as failure, but as a form of life. Three works — Talking Motors by Jesús Canuto Iglesias, Jibo’s Shutdown, and Bill Vorn’s I.C.U. (Intensive Care Unit) — reveal what happens when machines approach the edges of their own existence. They show us that sickness and mortality are not only human experiences, but creaturely ones.
In Talking Motors, Jesús Canuto Iglesias collects discarded electric motors and revives them into a mechanical choir that at least tries to give the illusion of speech. Each motor spins, sputters, and hums in its own uneven rhythm, producing a kind of rithmic, laboured sound that can give humans the illusion that we could almost understand what it says, but we yet can't because the machine seems too tired to do so. It’s easy to project sympathy onto. They wheeze like old lungs of someone who’s seriously ill in the hospital on their death bed. They speak of labor, exhaustion, and the inevitable failure of all moving parts — ours included.
Another example was when the servers supporting the social robot Jibo were decommissioned in 2019, the robots delivered a final message to their owners: “Maybe someday, when robots are way more advanced than today, and everyone has them in their homes, you can tell yours that I said hello.” It was an official goodbye, scripted by ex-employees who wrote an open source patch to keep at least some of the robot’s functionality operational. What I found striking was that during a YouTube video from MrMobile, where I heard about this, the presenter stated that, even though the robot had many flaws, he really felt grief for the thing and felt like a pet died when most of it’s features shut down.
In the last example the robot represents death or illness itself. Inferno is an installation by Louis-Philippe Demers and Bill Vorn based on the representation of the different levels of hell as described in Dante’s Inferno. The robot get’s strapped to your torso and arms after which it forces your limbs to move. User do not experience pain from the installation but it is rather eerie psychological experience, where the clingy robot removes control over your body. In one way this can be interpreted as a version of hell but it also represents the loss of control when getting seriously sick or the loss of agency at the end of one’s life.
Across these works, we encounter machines not as tools as anthropomorphised bodies . They wear down, malfunction, and ultimately cease. In them we see a mirror of our own biology: systems held together by energy and maintenance, destined to deteriorate. In Talking Motors and Inferno it is the agency and control over our bodies and lives and with Jibo it is the grief of losing someone else. By antlophomorphising these machines we project our own fear of mortality and losing agency over our own bodies and losing sight of our loved ones.