Katherine Behar became interested in basket weaving when a basket-making how-to book surprised her with a claim that basketry is the only mass-produced process to resist mechanical automation. Since Behar’s practice centers on automation, this caught her eye. Are container ship loads of baskets made by hand because robots don’t have dexterity for fine manipulation? Or because exploited humans remain cheaper than machines? How could an art project broach computational labor’s extractivism, even countering that logic by fostering collaboration with robots, rather than pitting humans and robots against one another in a race to the bottom? Like prior works, Inside Outsourcing stages living with more-than-humans to promote solidarity and care. A series of sculptures will display limits to robotic basket production as expert human basket weavers and Behar caringly recuperate robots’ mistakes into unique vessels. A video will capture an absurd attempt at remote group puppetry: using full-body motion capture, a group of performers will each operate a robotic finger to undertake the humble first step needed to begin the process of basket weaving: merely picking up a piece of straw. Differences in scale (full body/finger), detail (blunt/dexterous), and collectivity (group/digit), will echo the enormous disproportion in effort when robotic hands literally grasp at straws through a group’s coordinated efforts. Keeping robotics mostly offscreen will highlight the unrecognizable choreography of smushing, straining bodies at work, contorting to conform to machine readability.