I began working on the project FRIEND in late 2024, prompted by WABOT-2: a 400kg creative humanoid from 1984 in whom I found an unexpected catalyst. FRIEND would become an exhibition I curated at the National Communication Museum (NCM) in Naarm/Melbourne a year later. The show considered the ways that people attach meaning, emotion and ritual to technologies, how we evolve as companions, collaborators and extensions of each other. But beyond spectacle, I was interested in commoning.[1]
By commoning I mean humans and machines coming together across time, place, language and ‘disciplines’ to talk about how care, embodiment and self-organisation can model new relationships: intimacy beyond the reach of Big Tech. I also mean falling for Weak Robots; vacuum-sealing Trickless Bears in Busan; figuring out how to get famed Pong-playing organoids to respond in real time to your body; and helping robots of all shapes and sizes into various suitcases, onto airplanes and through customs. In short: co-creation, curating decay and trips to Bunnings.
What if the relationships that we have with embodied, intelligent and living machines are anchored in practices of care? The following text threads exhibition notes, pictures and interviews from my yearlong collaboration with the small group of artists, researchers, technologists and technologies (connecting Australia, Japan, South Korea, China and the UK) who would become FRIEND.
Fragile robots, tofu skin and Teddy with the ‘good fur’
Professor Michio Okada’s robots arrived at NCM for FRIEND in modular plastic boxes with hand drawn descriptions — faces with big eyes, wobbly arms, latex tofu skin. Okada and his robots are well known across Japan for ‘weakness’. The technological world fixates on strength and progress, he says. But one day he started stripping the long-held imperatives of power, speed and autonomy from the machines he made.[2] From this shift, a family of intelligent and vulnerable machines grew.
Okada and I had been emailing for a year before meeting, but it wasn’t until we stood together in the gallery installing the Weak Robots that it sunk in. Here was someone who woke up and went to work each day for decades, focusing uncountable hours of his time to undoing. Each design gesture centers empathy in symbiosis. Care is both the method and outcome of the hand-made robots he creates. Caring feels ‘with’ rather than for or about others.[3] It’s a practice that embraces intimate, sensory and challenging encounters in a way that theory, or speculation alone, cannot.
In an article about Okada’s work, Minja Axelsson and Lea Luka Sikau imagine the Weak Robots in opposing utopian and dystopian design fiction scenarios. In the latter, the cute robots weaponise affect as agents of a surveillance state.[4] This tension between structural extraction, emotion and technology recalls an email that EJ Son sent me about their artwork early on during their FRIEND commission. They wrote:
The original dancing Teddy was born in the winter of 2022, during a period of self- imposed isolation. In the absence of intimacy, I longed for the comfort of a lover’s embrace. I remembered my childhood teddy bear and wished I could return to that time — so I made one, larger than life. Originally, Teddy was an entertainer — swaying its hips in an endless loop, its camera eye both watching and being watched. The work explored the idea of entertainment as labour, mirroring the historical origins of the word robot [...] Thinking Teddy does not rebel. It simply stops. As stopping itself can be an act of resistance.[5]
Son steps out what the academics miss. Humans and machines happen together, shaping one another. These relationships take place within broader techno-fascist infrastructures, yes. The innate human need to communicate and connect is too often mobilised to coerce and exploit for capital. But it’s not a zero-sum game. Nuance, complexity and conversation dissolve binary.
Son and Professor Okada, through the speculative works that they create and tend to, remind us that intersubjectivity emerges through reciprocity. Considered design choices, creativity, low-tech and collaborative methods can interrogate and transform how people think about and live with machines. They disrupt Big Tech’s top-down systems of optimisation and extraction through being.
‘New ways of having a body’, making bodies, being bodies[6]
In the throes of AI hype and hysteria, so much of popular dialogue seems to forget the body. Embodiment reframes questions of care, emotion and technology. Who designs these forms? How do human and robot bodies merge? What ethics embed in these choices? Machines with social presence enact new kinds of relationships.[7] Technologies born of flesh and blood complicate narratives about the future.
In Theory of JIZAI Body: Towards Mastery Over the Extended Self, Professor Masahiko Inami presents a new philosophy for technological embodiment, explaining how modern technologies have de-somatised humans.[8] Stemming from enlightened ideas, these post-industrial technologies separate mind from body, human from machine (and both from their environments). In opposition to modern techno disassociation, he sees the JIZAI Body as merging humans and technologies within physical and digital worlds. Harmony is a method, aim and outcome of symbiosis.[9] Inami and his team brought some of the JIZAI Body projects to Australia as part of FRIEND. Extra fingers, third eye glasses, PickHits and the JIZAI Arms, a set of research led supernumerary robotic limbs.
Technological relationships anchored in care are less a question of what you can do and more about how you feel with and for humans and non-human ‘others’.[10] As Inami’s team asked during the opening weekend discussion: How might having shareable limbs shape how you love? How would you mourn them?[11]
Belinda J Dunstan and Ted Luo wearing JIZAI Arms at NCM, 2025. Photo: Casey Horsfield.
On a research visit late in the project, I was surprised to see the tech start-up Cortical Labs — the one that famously taught lab grown neurons to play the video games Pong — so close to the Brunswick Woolworths. Inside the actual labs, we looked into microscopes. Neurons grown from human stem cells responded to stimuli, adapting and learning. Integrated into a silicon chip within a CL1 computer, these neurons form part of an experimental biocomputing system: a step toward systems based on Synthetic Biological Intelligence (SBI) rather than AI. After the visit we talked about the attention, consistency and responsibility it takes to maintain them, not unlike raising humans.
In the experimental FRIEND collaboration, Closed Loop Connections, creative technologist Jenn Leung visualises the Cortical Labs neurons using Unreal Engine. As tiny bursts of light, they respond in real time to human movement sent to them as data. In these acts of co-creation, I see the transformative possibilities of a new kind of computation, one that disrupts the deeply problematic metaphor of ‘artificial’ intelligence. What new forms of knowing, being and doing might arise with a technology that is more than human? Artists are essential to this process. To scale, I also see the inherent tension between intent, perception, use and the broader technological infrastructures that these technologies now exist in.
This tension doesn’t have to immobilise. I’m reminded of a message that NCM Studio creative technologist Jesse Stevens sent me during FRIEND development. I’d been amassing a loose collective of robots deemed obsolete, broken or ‘dead’. Jesse would go on to work closely with these machines, transforming them in the process. ‘It’s been so weird hunting for help with the Peppers,’ he wrote. ‘Almost everyone just says, “buy a new robot, there are lots of new ones out there.”’ Instead, Jesse overrode the parameters set by the now-defunct company that made Pepper, connecting the robot to an external ‘brain’ running a local LLM as part of a story world co-shaped with writer Grace Chan. Technologies have always been deeply material. And, as with all material things, care isn’t just about creation or preservation.
Pepper in gallery as part of FRIEND at NCM, 2026. Photo: Marie-Luise Skibbe
Curating decay, death and disruption What technologies and relationships do we need to let fallow? What revives — and in reviving — must decay?[12] What needs to die? WABOT 2, created at the dawn of the internet, represents another juncture in human-machine relationships. For me, it was a technology not designed to replace but to become a creative partner. In a technological world marked by metaphor, hallucination, violence and extraction, care becomes an act of refusal and a form of creative disruption. Caring with intelligent, embodied and living machines is a step towards moral growth.[13] FRIEND isn’t about techno-utopianism. It’s about artists, technologists and technologies showing how collaboration through creative practice can prompt new relationships, new rituals and new humans.
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[1] Sophie Bloeman and Florine Zegers, ‘What is commoning and why is it so important’, Commons Network, 5 April 2022, https://www.commonsnetwork.org/2021/04/05/what-is-commoning-and-why-is-it-so-important/ (accessed 20 January 2026).
[2] This exchange paraphrases a part of an interview between Professor Michio Okada, Shun Nishimura and Nao Ouchi filmed and myself at NCM. ‘Curator in Conversation | ICD-Lab’, National Communications Museum, November 2025, https://ncm.org.au/exhibitions/friend/content-map#curator-in-conversation-icd-lab (accessed 6 April 2026).
[3] Hiʻilei Julia Kawehipuaakahaopulani Hobart and Tamara Kneese, ‘Radical Care: Survival Strategies for Uncertain Times,’ Social Text 38, no. 1, 2020, p. 1–16.
[4] Minja Axelsson and Lea Luka Sikau, ‘Choreographing Trash Cans: On Speculative Futures of Weak Robots in Public Spaces,’ arXiv, 2025, https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.13810 (accessed 21 January 2026)
[5] The name of this artwork by EJ Son, co-presented with Openspace Bae (Busan, South Korea), has evolved over several iterations. In the exhibition FRIEND, it is presented as 재주없는곰 | Trickless Bear.
[6] This idea draws upon the quote displayed as part of FRIEND: ‘New embodiment is about new ways of having a body, commandeering a body, fabricating a body or being like a body.’ Madeline Schwartzman in: Madeline Schwartzman, Edward Ashton and Kelly Heaton, Alive: Synthetic Cells, Feral Robots, Rebellious AI, and the Design of Radical Life, Thames & Hudson, London, 2023.
[7] Dr Belinda J Dunstan, ‘The Trouble of Robot Bodies’, commissioned by the National Communication Museum, 18 Mar 2026, .https://ncm.org.au/knowledge/the-trouble-of-robot-bodies (accessed 11 April 2026).
[8] Masahiko Inami, ‘Preface’ in Masah (ed.), Theory of JIZAI Body: Towards Mastery Over the Extended Self, Springer, 2023, pp.v-vii.
[9] This text draws from personal conversations with Inami and his team over the project and his talk at the National Communication Museum held in March 2026.
[10] ‘Others’ as explored by Dunstan in ‘The Trouble of Robot Bodies’.
[11] The JIZAI Arms team have explored variations of this question in multiple forms. For a more detailed look at some of the ideas behind this see: Nahoko Yamamura et al., ‘Social Digital Cyborgs: The Collaborative Design Process of JIZAI ARMS’, CHI ’23: Proceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, article no. 369, https://doi.org/10.1145/3544548.3581169 (accessed 15 November 2024).
[12] Caitlin DeSilvey, Curated Decay: Heritage Beyond Saving, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017.
[13] Luisa Damiano often talks about the ways that living with robots can be a prompt for individual and collective moral growth rather than a question of domination and subservience. Email to author, 16 October 2025.
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