Can't help myself by Chinese artists Sun Yuan and Peng Yu is... well what is it, have a look at the left. This work certainly doesn't fit our usual Bots Like You Occam's Razor of how can you deliver a maximal experience of a dimension of humanness with minimal technical means. Still, there is something very interesting about this creature, but what is it?
At first sight it is both very powerful and very helpless at the same time. But more fundamentally, you immediately understand that it's struggle for life is fruitless as it will fail in the end. And what is the point of only struggling to survive?
So it appeals to something very general - our own existential fear. What's the point of life, and to what extent are we also running in a similar metaphorical hamster wheel?
This work was commissioned in 2016 by the Guggenheim for Tales of our Time exhibition and was subsequently shown at the 2019 Venice Biennale. For more information see the artists' web site and this article.