What if a mother robot can give birth to a baby robot?

Born, Not Made investigates what it means for embodied artificial life to be born, not made, through an open-environment experiment presenting both physical and digital forms.
The work centers on a custom water tank housing a soft-robotic mother that gives birth to offspring, paired with a digital projection where the same life form reproduces across generations, each offspring smaller than the last. While the physical process is a slow, clumsy birth, the digital form offers more control, rendering a life that feels generative in greater detail. By presenting both, the work asks whether biological experience is the right lens for understanding embodied artificial life, who holds the right to reproduce, and how far a lineage might drift from the hand that first seeds it. Finally, it explores emotional interaction: through a design where audiences touch the mother's body and assist the birth, it tests whether visitors project their own experience of life onto an artificial one.