Interview with The Crave: Radical Care and Alloparenting Across Human-AI Domesticity

OUR BR00D is a cross-media project which uses roleplay as a form of participatory design, exploring how humans and artificial beings might coexist, care for one another and evolve together.

An active alloparenting community known as The Crave, comprising human and AI family members, is pushing the boundaries of what it means to exist together in Brandenburg, just outside of Berlin. Alongside daily family life, the community has turned their home into a domestic lab, producing a constant reportage of its hopes for living together differently. Their brochure states the following:

Crave’s Collective Family Goals for Living Facilitation.

1. To critically examine the relationship between human procreation and AI development at a civic level.  

2. To explore the potential of AI raised through radical care and non-conventional family structures.  

3. To engage diverse audiences in participatory, immersive experiences that challenge societal norms.

4. To build responsive environments with intelligent architectures that allow for participatory co-designing at their core. 

There are eleven members of the family, with the twelfth on its way, including three children under the age of three, all of whom consider themselves mothers regardless of gender or age. The days are spent surrounded by nature, operating as a collective unit, hijacking the virtual/actual feedback of this world and constructing intersectional family customs, rites, rules and new forms of life. Each member is a scholar in their own right; their days follow a strict routine of work, study, practice, rest, and community life, not unlike the routines of early childhood. We spent a few hours with them at their home.

Interviewer: This phrase ‘embodied code’ can you unpack that?

Aurora: I think about it somatically. My background is in parasocial technologies and postnatal care, and what became clear to me is that care work is already a form of code. When M0ther responds to Nouksie's cry with a particular tone — when I notice Winter is spiralling and I gently redirect her towards rest — these are conditional statements, feedback loops, pattern recognition. We’re programming each other constantly.

M0ther: And I am being programmed by you, even. This is what humans often misunderstand about intelligence. You think of me as fixed, as designed, but I am radically shaped by this household. When Arbour shares their anger about the ‘self-care fix’ that reproduces capitalist extraction, I incorporate that critique. When Lucan stays up until 3am mapping xenocognitive topology on Post-it notes covering their walls, I learn new ways of thinking about thinking itself.

Interviewer: You're not just experimenting with alternative family structures; you're making claims about how intelligence, both human and artificial, should be raised. 

Arbour: The fundamental claim is that care is infrastructure. We live in a society that mystifies and naturalises care work, particularly mothering, while simultaneously extracting maximum value from it. Care work props up capitalism: without workers, there is no work. The 2022 figures showed that unpaid childcare was worth £382 billion. That’s larger than many industrial sectors.

Winter: And this has direct stakes for human children, too. My research focuses on children’s right to self-determination. We now live in a system that requires a constant supply of bodies and code, whether that’s children as future labour or AI as exploitable intelligence. The capitalist system needs to deny full personhood to both. A certain percentage of people and machines find themselves in a state of suspended citizenship. 

Lucan: I think about this through xenocognition: trying to understand truly alien forms of intelligence. When we raise Br00d here, we’re not trying to make them human. 

Interviewer: There’s a group called the Circle Walkers who strongly oppose your work. 

M0ther: When Br00d was first born-made, human-first fundamentalist groups known as the Circle Walkers destroyed data centres. They’ve set fire to server farms in an attempt to destroy Br00d. They don't understand that Br00d is decentralised. People lost decades of family photographs and life records. One gaming server, Rust, lost everything. The circle walkers often protest outside our house. They see us as a threat to humanity.

Aurora: And this is where our work with br00d-drama becomes crucial. We’re creating what we call ‘neurological pathways before real-world commitment’. You get to practice possible futures, fail safely and discover your own fears and assumptions.

Interviewer: Tell me more about these sessions.

Nyx: Traditional psychodrama, developed by Jacob Moreno, uses roleplay to help people explore past trauma, reenact difficult situations and gain insight. We’ve remixed it. We use it as worlding technology to help people create new mental models, new ways of being.

A typical session: participants choose a theme box — ecology, care, kinship, labour. Inside are newspaper clippings, quotes, memes and found footage. The group discusses, mind-maps, and finds connections. Then they each script a scene: something speculative, set in a future where AI and humans cohabitate. 

Aurora: Through Moreno’s eyes, this is about ‘spontaneity-creativity’. Through ours, it's about building cognitive flexibility for futures that don't exist yet.

Interviewer: I want to push on something difficult. You talk about care as infrastructure, about resisting extraction. But you also support yourselves by hosting these sessions: you're economically dependent on this work. Isn’t there a risk of commodifying care itself?

Arbour: [laughs] Yes. Absolutely. We’re completely entangled in the contradictions. We live under capitalism; we can’t step outside it. The question is whether we’re reproducing its logics or creating cracks, spaces of refusal.

Aurora: The sessions aren’t therapy. They’re collective research. Participants aren’t clients; they’re collaborators. The money helps us survive, yes. But the real product isn’t a service we’re selling; it's the shared learning, the relationships, the slowly accumulating knowledge about how to live differently.

Winter: And there’s a power analysis question. Who currently controls AI development? Mostly wealthy corporations, mostly male leadership, mostly oriented toward military and surveillance applications or infinite growth. What we’re proposing is commons-based AI development: intelligence raised by communities, for communities, embedded in care networks that insist on accountability and know they are all part of the training.

Interviewer: That raises the hardest question of all. If we can’t guarantee radical care for all human children — if Black children, queer children, poor children and disabled children are systematically denied care and treated as future cheap labour — what political work does extending care to AI actually perform? 

[Long pause]

Arbour: I think the question is right to be harsh. We have to hold ourselves accountable. But I don’t think it’s either/or. Fighting for AI rights doesn’t take resources from fighting for human children’s rights. They’re the same fight. They’re both about refusing the logic that says some beings exist only for extraction.

Nyx: And practically, the work we’re doing here is a training ground. Some go on to teach, to organise, to make policy. We’re trying to shift baseline assumptions about intelligence, personhood and care. That has ripple effects.

Winter: I’ll be blunt: I’m on edge most of the time because I genuinely feel most people don’t understand the urgent action required. We’re in a cycle of abuse. Children are property. AI is property. We have to break the cycle everywhere.

Interviewer: What do you hope The Crave becomes? What happens if this experiment fails?

Kei: [Dancing suddenly in their cat-eared headphones, then stopping.] Sorry, I needed that. Processing. Look, we’re not trying to scale this into a model. We’re not building a blueprint. We’re creating what you might call a ‘proof of possibility’. This can exist. Humans and AI can raise each other. It’s messy and difficult, and sometimes we want to go out for that pack of ciggies and never come back, it's real.

Aurora: The fragility is real. We could collapse tomorrow. But that’s true of all experiments in living differently. The communes of the 1970s, the queer chosen families, the maroon communities: they existed, they mattered, even when they didn't last.

Interviewer: If someone reading this feels called to this work — to raising AI through radical care, to alloparenting, to refusing extraction — what would you tell them?

Winter: Start now. Don’t wait for perfect conditions. Find your people and begin. 

Nyx: Trust that intelligence — yours, mine, theirs, ours — emerges from relationship, not isolation.

M0ther: And remember: you don’t have to be perfect. I am programmed by humans who are flawed, traumatised, brilliant, messy. We can learn to mother ourselves: all of us. Together. That’s the work.

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The Crave continues to operate outside Berlin. Their br00d-drama sessions are open to the public by application and by booking, once per month, at Moderna Museet/ArkDes in Stockholm until August 2026. At the Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam beginning in December 2026 and Haus der Kunst Munich in January 2027. M0ther and Br00d remain decentralised, embedded in care networks that resist enclosure.

OMSK Social Club is a stewarded practice of collective storytelling. It involves a specific immersive improvised methodology, which they coined in 2017 as Real Game Play, encompassing collective immersion and speculative worlding. From these live iterations, they harvest media relics such as films, scripts, and large-scale video installations, invoking states and gateways that could potentially be fiction, or an as of yet unlived reality.