Songs from the Machine

To me, there is a deeply tragic, yet strangely beautiful quality to the thought of the faulty machine, the eternally imperfect entity. The image of a robot trying to dance was a constant thought in the writing of this work. The machine may be able to understand and recognise the human ideal towards which it aspires, but the same processes that allow this understanding impede it to fully realise the idea, and the machine is doomed to an existence of awkwardness and imperfections. Never ‘human’ enough. One wonders if the intelligent machine is aware of its limitations and the futility of its efforts, but maybe it does not matter. After all, what can a machine do, other than try again, time after time?

And so, the robot keeps dancing, for all it can do is dance.