Vicious Cycles

2024

Duration: 5:15

Grade 3.5

For Hacketsttown High School in Hacketsttown, NJ.

Inspired by the haunting installation Can't Help Myself by Sun Yuan and Peng Yu, Vicious Cycles explores the tension between control and futility. The original artwork, a robotic arm programmed to contain a spreading pool of red liquid, endlessly scrapes and flails in a useless and ultimately futile loop, a machine mimicking human behavior in a display of frustration, obedience, and decay.

The music traces three emotional phases: dance, duty, and demise. The opening dance is smooth and lyrical, reflecting the strange grace of the machine’s early movements, a choreography caught between elegance and compulsion. As the piece progresses, the tone shifts. In the duty section, tension builds through repetition and mechanical rhythm, embodying the relentless burden of a task with no end. Finally, in demise, the music frays and fades, exhausted but ongoing. The melody itself ends mid-phrase, as if the machine, too, has broken down before completing its task.

In the end, Vicious Cycles is not just about a machine—it’s about us. Our need for control, our silent obedience, our slow unraveling. There’s something deeply human in watching the machine’s failure in its desperate loyalty and its slow decline. This piece leans into that emotion: a portrait of something trying, and failing, to hold itself together.