FURBOT | SOFT TECH FOR SAD FUTURE

Furbot is an audiovisual work—a live concert and installation—constructed from syntographic moving images generated by AI models trained on archival footage of objects from toy markets, flea markets, and Mexican otaku circles. Its raw material is the first generation of consumer mechatronic toys: Furbys, Tamagotchis, and their Chinese and Latin American pirate counterparts.

These objects arrived in the 1990s and early 2000s, fueled by the omnipresence of television, informal trade networks, and the fantasy of a simulated intelligence that could be cared for: a mechatronic companion that breathed, responded, and seemed to desire things. In Latin America, they circulated through smuggling and low-quality copies, mutating along the way. Furbot begins with that mutation: with what these objects promised and what they failed to deliver.

The work follows a generation of Latin American women, now in their thirties and forties, who grew up with this vision of the future. They appear here with these toys as affective technologies—emotional receptacles, personal assistants, tender AI companions—practicing a form of contemporary adulthood called kidulting: remaining within softness, excess, and a hyper-cute mechatronic aesthetic as a way of rejecting the scripts of motherhood and adulthood that were written for them. The kawaii that runs through the work is a political surface.

In contrast, today's children receive a Furby as a gift and feel nothing. For them, these objects have no future, only the aesthetics of obsolescence. The tablet has replaced fantasy.