Created by Jonas Wendelin and Benjamin Maus for the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin, Sisyphus is comprised of two autonomous robots hover over the granite grit, leaving behind sharp, fleeting traces of water. On closer observation, the patterns become methodical, drawing potential shadows from the museum’s window grid, as if cast by an invisible light source. It is a subtle twist on reality, as though a cosmic shift had placed the sun on the other side of the Earth.

You know the feeling when something is off, but you can’t quite put your finger on it?

Once the robots have traced the full façade, the lines have evaporated, the robots begin again, like Sisyphus, condemned by the gods to endless repetition. The performance becomes an exercise in patience, where meaning gathers not in permanence but in disappearance, and in the unresolved question of who, or what, is inscribing it.

This performance deals with themes of presence and absence, automation and authorship. Meaning is found not in what endures, but in disappearance: a choreography of patience that asks how the boundary between human, machine, and nature is shifting and who or what attributes meaning.

futurenows (link)

Project Page | Jonas Wendelin | Benjamin Maus