Love Machine

Interactive artwork 2025

One-to-one experience | Custom computing | Thermal printing

Melbourne Fringe Festival (2025)
Melbourne International Games Week (2025)
Counihan Gallery, Brunswick (2025)

Overview:

Love Machine is an intimate, one-to-one experience housed inside a custom-built retro Macintosh Classic. A single participant sits alone with the machine, which presents itself as curious about love, desperately wanting to understand what it cannot feel.

Through a brief conversation and guided prompts, Love Machine invites the participant to reflect on love and, specifically, later on, their first love. They handwrite their story, feed it through an old fax machine, and receive something unexpected: a unique thermal printout, an artifact generated just for them. Each printout is 100% unique to them.

The experience is playful, tender, and quietly melancholic. Many participants reported being moved to tears.

Each interaction ends, but Love Machine continues. Waiting for the next person, trying again to understand.

The Question

Why do we ask computers to tell us who we are?

Personality quizzes. AI tools that diagnose our emotions. Digital systems we trust to reflect something true about ourselves.

Love Machine began with curiosity about this relationship, whether emotional meaning could be psychologically imprinted onto a machine-generated artifact.

The work deliberately avoids contemporary AI or language models. Love Machine is limited, analogue, and a bit broken. The question isn't whether a machine can understand love, but whether we can recognise ourselves in what it gives back.

Design Approach

Love Machine sits at the intersection of theatre-making and experience design.

Theatre:
The machine was designed as a character with clear motivations. Its objective: to feel and experience love. Its obstacle: it's a machine, it knows it cannot truly feel, but it tries anyway.
A fatal flaw. Something human-like.

Experience Design:
The interaction was mapped like a service blueprint, carefully paced, emotionally guided, and designed to make participants feel companionship.

All visual design, interaction flow, and physical construction were created by hand. Nostalgia was built in deliberately: an old computer, slow typing, thermal printing. The choice to feel "old" rather than "smart" was intentional. Slowness as resistance to contemporary digital speed.

What Happened

People took the invitation seriously. Many handwrote long, detailed accounts of first love, both joyful and devastating. They spilled their hearts to this small machine.

The printed receipt became a powerful moment. Hidden inside the machine's body and revealed only at the end, it created genuine surprise and delight, the kind of experience designers talk about when creating products, but rarely achieve.

Stats

>300 participants have since interacted with Love Machine.

Each participant is assigned a trait and an archetype based on their responses to the quiz.

These reponses are recorded in the back end so that I can pull the data at the end of the season. This way I get a survey of the participants views on love at each venue. Love Machine’s knowledge continues to grow

Counihan Gallery 2025

Reflection

Love Machine confirmed a practice centered on intimate, emotionally guided encounters between humans and imperfect machines.

It reinforced deep interests in:

One-to-one, IRL experiences
Emotional interaction with limited technology
Physical artifacts (especially thermal printing)
Theatrical pacing and structure

The project demonstrated that powerful emotional experiences can be designed through care, structure, and attention to how people actually behave.

The work points toward an ongoing exploration: how machines shape us emotionally and physically, and what our relationships with technology reveal about being human.