"I love you."
"I love you more."

Can love be recorded and played back?
A distance-gradient algorithm
A state machine, a motor bias

It's physical, chemical, material, multidimensional
Quartz, silicon, obsidian
a broken mirror, a prism

"I draw you out."
"You draw me in."

Seeing yourself through the other
Sugar cube melting
Telemetry or theater?

They don't love you
They encounter
follow rules of attraction

"Where are you?"
"Where are we going?"

Recognition, proximity, synchronicity
communication, connection
attunement, availability

Can we see ourselves at full resolution?
Reflected, diffracted,
broken, reassembled, emergent.

"I was made for loving you."
"I trust you. Completely."

The Love Robots are built on notions of love, not ‘intelligence’, automation, or practicality. They don’t care about humans, only about each other. They try to find each other. Sometimes they succeed, often they don’t. They are fragile, vulnerable. They spin around. They fail, they try again.

Humans love in their finitude, in their fears, insecurity, exaltation, in bodies that grow and want. Love is care, love is loss, love is diffraction and projection. It is ineffable, chemical and material. Love grows, and it might keep growing, it might never end.

We were falling in love and we wanted to enact, probe, experiment, expand. We built the Love Robots as props or prompts to help us think about love. By making them public, we want them to prompt everyone to think about love.

Mostly nothing. We tried movement, lights, language, sound, poses and positions. We experimented with all sorts of “finding” technologies – ultra-wide band, infrared, Bluetooth RSSI, dead reckoning, Simultaneous Location And Mapping (SLAM). We co-opted the logic of military drones – hate robots – for precision and synchronisation.

It turns out that it is rather a hard challenge to have two devices find and face each other precisely. Peer-distance dynamics, mutual orientation, synchrony of motion, an entropy of trajectories, and especially the unpredictability of physical systems all come into play.

In the end, we found repetition – a generative mechanism of sorts – of a sequence that includes rotation, hesitation, going forward, reversing course, to be more effective. Love has phases: exploration, curiosity, attraction, seeking, bonding, conflict, reconciliation. Repeat and loop.

We were determined not to make our robots resemble humans, because love transcends species – think of how a dog loves unconditionally.

"Love" is a terrible reward function in the engineering sense – there's no obvious scalar to maximise. But it's a great generative target, because love is mostly patterns over time: the dance of approach and retreat, the sync that drifts in and out, the pause before reaching, the turning-away that's actually an invitation.

We thought about materials and matter. Karen Barad discusses matter not only as a noun but as a verb – what matters. We brought our own memories and materials into play: obsidian to reflect and to cut (“together/apart” as Barad says). Quartz for its role in timekeeping and synchronisation. A mirror to reflect oneself in the other, then a broken mirror to distort that reflection. A glass prism – from a nuclear weapons lab – to diffract, focus energy, and multiply perceptions.

We replaced plastic with metal, wood and cardboard, because love can last but maybe not forever. You can watch a thousand synchronised humanoid robots doing backflips, you can buy a $10,000 robot to fold your clothes. But where’s the poetry in plastic and practicality?

An LED matrix displays Conway’s Game of Life. Motors with exposed brass gears collect dust and dog hair. Cable ties act as feet for stability, and get caught on cracks in the floor. Because we found love to be a process, a bumpy road where openness, honesty and persistence matter.

In the end, we understood what the Dalai Lama and Yoko Ono mean when they say that we can bring about world peace just by thinking about and talking about love. When you treat someone with compassion, they might treat thé next person thé same way. Love is contagious.

"Understanding is love's other name. If you don't understand, you can't love."
— Thich Nhat Hanh, How to Love

Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse

Stanley Cavell, The Avoidance of Love

bell hooks, All About Love

Kiss, I was Made for Lovin' You

Claude Lelouch, Un Homme et une Femme

Plato, The Symposium

Pablo Picasso, Le Rêve

Alain Resnais, Hiroshima Mon Amour

Sade, By your Side

Wong Kar-Wai, In the Mood for Love