Born, not Made

Born, Not Made is an interactive installation and generative simulation that re-evaluates machine reproduction as a time-extended, embodied, and intra-active physical process. Moving beyond traditional Artificial Life paradigms that model reproduction as instantaneous data copying driven by external fitness functions, this work grounds proliferation in physical soft robotics and multi-agent systems powered by Large Language Models. By bridging physical fluid dynamics and digital linguistic evolution, the project reframes machine agency not as an autonomous binary attribute, but as a distributed and shared phenomenon across human touch, ancestral memory, and generative deliberation.