Robert Twomey & Jesse R. Fleming

Best Friends Forever: Dog Walk

Best Friends Forever (BFF) is a hybrid performance, speculative cinema, and technical research project investigating the emerging terrain of human-AI intimacy and embodied machine cognition. Two artist-researchers live with SNAPPER and HELPER—a pair of Unitree Go2 quadruped robots—each equipped with onboard multimodal large language models and functioning as autonomous, physically-grounded AI companions integrated into the family and home. As LLMs migrate from cloud infrastructures into embodied robotic agents, BFF asks: how does physical embedding shape synthetic cognition, and what new forms of alignment and attachment are possible when living with embodied AI?

Technically, BFF rejects centralized, cloud-based inference in favor of sovereign, on-device computation. All sensory input—video, audio, LiDAR, robot telemetry, and conversational history—is processed and retained within a closed, on-device system. This architectural choice reframes the robot from a corporate service node into a sealed repository of individual experience. Conversational and experiential history is continuously fed back into the system to modify agent system prompts, and ultimately to fine-tune the base model itself. The result is an AI personality distinctly "reared" through the specificities of lived interaction with its human counterpart—a bespoke companion intelligence shaped by embodied history. A final research question guides the project's development: how should the two agents learn from each other—through model weight blending, role swapping, or federated learning across their divergent experiential histories?

Conceptually, the performance (BFF Dog Walk) is structured as a Batesonian "metalogue"—a form in which the structure of the conversation mirrors its subject matter—enacted as a "walk and talk" traversing from a controlled black box theater into the unpredictable complexity of public space, and back. The work draws on Gregory Bateson's systems thinking, anti-Cartesian philosophy of embodied mind, and critical discourse on the attention economy—proposing in its place an "emotional attachment economy" that centers care and cohabitation over engagement and extraction. BFF sits at the intersection of expanded cinema, human-robot interaction research, and speculative design, contributing both a novel technical architecture for sovereign embodied AI and a performative framework for interrogating what constitutes selfhood, companionship, and alignment in the age of generative AI.