Best Friends Forever (In development)
Best Friends Forever (BFF) is a new media artwork exploring intimacy, embodiment, intelligence, and alignment in human-AI relationships through co-parenting two robot dogs. Documented as an experimental film, the project follows two-artist researchers—each paired with an identical robot dog and local LLM—as they cultivate emotional bonds, train model behavior, and dialogue on questions of mind, embodiment, and relationality in the age of generative AI. Structured as a metalogue, the form mirrors its questions, blending dialogue with rich multi-modal imagery drawn from a range of human and machine perspectives. Working with LIDAR scans, 360° video, gaussian splats, and snapshots of internal internal model states—the film constructs a hybrid cinematic language that toggles between perception and affect; embodiment, computation, and language. As the collaborators exchange and evolve the AI’s “mind” across distance and time, BFF documents this distributed act of care and co-creation. The film interrogates the boundaries between simulation and authenticity, emotional labor and machine learning, human complexity and synthetic intelligence, offering a poetic meditation on what we aspire to, what we search for in relation to our machine kin.
COLLABORATORS:
Jesse Reding Fleming: Artist-Researcher
Robert Twomey: Artist-Researcher