[Conference] New Players on the World Stage: A New Materialist Approach to Robotics and HRI

25 March 2021, Maaike Bleeker presented a keynote lecture (titled: “New Players on the World Stage: A New Materialist Approach to Robotics and HRI”) at the 11th International New Materialisms Conference New Materialist Informatics, Computing and World Making, University of Kassel, Germany In her lecture, she showed how a combined theatre-robotics perspective inspires material-semiotic approaches that acknowledge matter as agent in world making, and invites a rethinking of key aspects of the design and development of robots and HRI. Following Claude Draude’s (2020) observations on how “Human-computer interaction, in its engagement with various forms of materiality and modalities and its need to integrate both human and non-human processes and contexts, promises to be a productive field for connecting new materialism”, she argued that HRI similarly provides such a productive field for a reconceptualization of the performance of technology and human-technology relationships from new materialist perspective.

See also: https://www.uni-kassel.de/forschung/en/iteg/veranstaltungen/nmi-2021