The Robot and Me
Built for desktop.
Seven experiments made with Claude Code. One is a two month conversation drawn as a single picture. One is a bot in the image of a poet who died in 1995.
A phone is too small to use them in. Open it on a desktop and take your time.
Hagara Ben Product & UX design, Berlin
hagarbenyishay@gmail.comThe Robot and Me
What this is
01 / What this isThe Robot and Me
I never wanted to know if the machine could replace me. I wanted to know what we’d make in the same room.
Every experiment here started as a question. No brief, no client, no deadline. Nobody asked for them. Nothing at all was at stake. I made them anyway.
One of them is a website I built in 2010 and lost. The only thing left of it is a video walkthrough. Another is 335 collages, cut and pasted in Photoshop, 2012 to 2022. Then I stopped working alone. Some of the questions the machine answered better than I did. Some it got completely wrong. I kept both.
Most portfolios quietly delete the second kind. Those are the ones that taught me my own taste.
02 / The experiments
Seven questions I could not answer alone.
Memorial website, rebuilt
Vagalumes
The project itself became a ghost. Only a walkthrough video survived. Sixteen years later, the machine and I are rebuilding it from that one surviving recording.
Open the experiment for VagalumesLook under the hood of VagalumesBuilt
2010Origin
Shenkar final projectStatus
Rebuilt 2026
Interactive collage archive
The Hagara Stuff Archive
The machine and I built one place where all of it lives: browse it as an archive, scroll it as a timeline, or tip it all loose in the spread.
Open the experiment for The Hagara Stuff ArchiveLook under the hood of The Hagara Stuff ArchiveWorks
335Years
2012 to 2022Medium
Digital collage
Relationship-data visualization
The Pattern
I took the whole conversation, every message, every hour, every silence, and handed it to a machine. I asked for something simple: show me the feeling.
Open the experiment for The PatternLook under the hood of The PatternSpan
Two monthsMessages
3,512Who
Me & Him
AI-directed collage
Be My Hands
Every collage I ever made started with my eye choosing the fragments. In this experiment I gave that choice away.
Open the experiment for Be My HandsLook under the hood of Be My HandsEye
The robotHands
MineMethod
It composes, I cut
Recorded machine conversations
ALIZA
A poet published eight of these in 1974. I have mine, and fourteen more from a bot in his image.
Open the experiment for ALIZALook under the hood of ALIZAProgram
ELIZA, 1966Script
37 keywordsConversations
Fifteen
Sleep-data specimen log
Night Colonies
I gave the whole export to a machine and asked it to keep a laboratory diary about me, and it calls me Subject 01.
Open the experiment for Night ColoniesLook under the hood of Night ColoniesSpan
14 of 14 nightsSignals
6 a nightSubject
01
Live-sourced overload piece
The Voices in my Head
The material that arrives is not mine: public domain photographs and mid-century film somebody else shot, four talking sources, strangers’ dreams, people saying in public that they are afraid a machine will take their job, every edit to every Wikipedia on earth, and every earthquake in the last hour, nearly all of it landing live while you watch.
Open the experiment for The Voices in my HeadLook under the hood of The Voices in my HeadBeat
500msVoices
FourKept
Nothing
The seven photographs are the machine’s. It staged each one from its own reading of the experiment.