Experiments with New Zealand's first robotic painting machine produced a body of work investigating art-making as a system, and authorship – with its contingent values of identity and authenticity – as a process, and not solely the product of the artist's touch. Against the flow of a contemporary art mainstream that dismissed digital painting as fake art, the artist directed a US-made painting robot she nicknamed Flo to apply fine French oil paint onto industrial plastics and stretched substrates in slow rhythmic grids. Through its mechanical back-and-forth, the robot gradually rendered the artist's coded content, a laborious process that could take several days for larger works. Light- and temperature-sensitive, Flo was isolated in a small dark room, where turpentine thinners heightened the soporific effects of extended machine labour. At any moment, digital or mechanical elements could glitch, abruptly interrupting the process, making incursions into the surface or ejecting paint into the room.

The machine's slick airbrushed results are disrupted in the walled FAke, where Flo penetrates a layered surface of fake grass. A landscape within a landscape, the cornered artwork occupies an architectural setting on the clifftop of confiscated Māori land. Its manifested image and title compose a split text: the 'F' references the Northern Hemisphere Fahrenheit temperature scale and Flo's initial (an artist's signature), while 'Ake', in te reo Māori, evokes the battle cry Ake Ake Ake! (Forevermore!) and a particle indicating direction and time. The digital FAke not only intrudes into the conventions of 'real painting' and its northern roots; it brings contested systems of language, time and authority into a landscape where questions of place, possession and resistance intersect.