It started when I looked at an IRL Work/Project called “Can’t Help Myself” by Sun Yuan and Peng Yu. I think most of us have seen that project/work, if not see this image below.

In this work, an industrial robot is programmed to try to contain the hydraulic fluid that’s constantly leaking out and required to keep itself running, if too much escapes, it will die so it's desperately trying to pull it back to continue to fight for another day.

The saddest part is they gave the robot the ability to do thirty-two movements like “scratch an itch,” “bow and shake,” and “ass shake, for spectators while the spill was contained.

When the project was first launched (2016) it danced around spending most of its time interacting with the crowd since it could quickly pull back the small spillage. Many years later it was worn down and hopeless...Because the amount of leaked fluid became unmanageable as the spill grew over time, there now isn't enough time to dance as it only has enough time to try to keep itself alive. The robot found itself in a race against time to preserve its functionality, leaving little room for entertaining performances.

The arm slowly came to a halt and died in 2019, but with a twist - the bot called a kuka servo, actually runs off of electricity, not hydraulics.

Sad but what a masterpiece.

If we think about this phenomenon it happens all the time to the gadgets we use daily like laptops, consoles(I’m a PS guy Btw), phones, iPads, and Apple Vision Pro joined the list just now, anything that uses hardware. They are working their entire life towards something they didn't even need just to entertain us. at the same time, surviving all the wear and tear of all those years of usage. Little do those gadgets know they can die not just because of the carelessness of their owners but also from a “kuka servo” like damage or fault of electricity in its circuit.

if we take this from a human perspective we all work for money all our lives and kill ourselves mentally && physically in an attempt to sustain life (pulling back the fluid). Little do we know that at some point in our lives, we can (will) have a circuit fault or damage in our body just like the “Kuka servo” that will end all this hustle.

Idea Of Damaged Circuit Born

This feeling of uncertainty led me to create “ Damaged Circuit ” a generative art project, the collection of 32 Generative Artworks (32 works because of those special 32 programmed moves of the dying robot arm that it has performed for its spectator to entertain them.). To appreciate the lifespan and death of that damaged circuit which we haven’t even cared about and have not even looked for malfunctions, while our bodies or gadgets we use do the pulling back fluid thing. (busy doing something important for ourselves).

I wanted it to be simple yet damaged somehow and represent it as visually while still showing its beauty after the damage to the circuit (speaking hypothetically) with the colors and glitch-like texture.

Making it more real

I wanted to make it more real by not just getting random or pseudorandom numbers and assigning values to the area, size, height, and width of those glitch textures(weighted lines, grided rectangles. etc). so I decided to get 32 memory chips (RAM) for the memory corruption to simulate the “kuka servo” unexpected situation and circuit fault. After getting them corrupted by memory corruption techniques(bursting them with incompatible and faulty modules) I wrote down a c program that can get me all those faulty/garbage values being returned by those chips.

Now the problem was to get those values and fit them into this concept, canvas, and textures so they could be placed fantastically on the generative canvas. That led to writing another Python program [chose Python for its crazy deep and accurate love of numbers and big values] to convert those values into something useful for this project.

Now all left was writing code and generating artwork. I use processing, a GUI library that can also be used to create beautiful generative artworks. I used processing with Kotlin [ new gf after java :-) ]. With over 1000 generations, 32 artworks were chosen to be shown to the world.

So that was my whole mindset for this project, I mean I can go deeper but don’t want anyone reading this to get crazily confused on coding terms and generative art terminology.

My Gratitude

I hope you guys enjoy reading this article AKA Documentation of my generative art project. Thank you for reading so far hoping you didn’t get bored of my not-so-good writing skills and enjoyed the whole process and mindset behind it. .

I also would love to express my special gratitude to Orb a friend of mine on Twitter(X) who encouraged me to write down the whole process & mindset behind this project. without him, this documentation wouldn’t have made it here. <3. You guys can follow him on X and I encourage you guys to also check check out his work. (@ArtofOrb)

Lastly, I encourage you guys to subscribe to me here on Mirror or via email by hitting that subscribe button down below with your big nerdy brains 🧠. So you guys can get documentation of my artwork and also who knows maybe I write down more articles about some cooler topics about the web3 && NFT Space.

With Regards & Love ❤️

XSUDO🏴