“If, as Shakespeare famously claimed, ‘All the world’s a stage and all the men and women merely players’, robots are the new kids on the block.” Prof. dr. Maaike Bleeker (Utrecht University) The podcast ‘Acting Like A Robot’ is about the research of the same name within which the VU, UU, HKU and Ulrike Quade…

Designing Human-Robot Encounters for the CTRL + ALT + PLAY event | By Pascalle Paumen From November 28 to November 30, 2024, researchers of the Dramaturgy for Devices project gathered in Utrecht for a second joint workshop to experiment with human-robot interactions. This time, we explored designing with and for encounters using the Rober robot – a table-like serving robot for the hospitality industry…

Exploring the Relational and Performative Potential of Smart Materials | By Pascalle Paumen On September 26, 2024, I attended the workshop “Expressive Mechanisms: From Petri-dish to Performativity” which took place at the Innovation:Lab at Theater Utrecht. The workshop was organised by 4TU.Design United, coordinated by Amy Winters from TU/e, and involved researchers of the Dramaturgy for Devices project to encounter soft robotic…

Pick me up, kick me out!  On 21 feburari, the Dutch newspaper NRC published an article on the research project Acting Like a Robot, which concluded festively on 31 January 2025 at De Paardenkathedraal. Read the article here (in Dutch)  

We are delighted to invite you to attend the PhD defense of Irene Alcubilla Troughton. She will defend her dissertation “Moving Together: A Performings Arts Approach to Human-Robot Interaction Design”. This dissertation tackles an important challenge in human-robot interaction (HRI): how to create meaningful encounters between humans and robots through movement. Traditionally, HRI has focused…

  December 2023   Based on the previous sprint focused on the voice and the sound of KUKA robots, this event brought into play questions of literary form and performance of literary texts. This larger theme was addressed together with Sjaan Flikweert, our guest and spoken word artist, who prepared three poems and two sequences…

  December 2023   Bram Ellens’ current project in progress introduced questions about voice and sound as the key topic of this ELRAT sprint. Specifically, Ellens works on a project involving the translation of a book, De robot van de romelmarkt, into a theatre play under the name Recycled Robot (Dragt 1967; see fig. 1). Moreover, since the theatre…

  December 2023 This ELRAT sprint was focused on manual (real-time) manipulation of the KUKA robots in the context of the performing arts, which brings about specific concerns of safety. Firstly, manual manipulation via a remote control was pointed out in the preceding sprint for the possibility of robot expressing a more thoughtful movement or…

    December 2023   In this sprint event of the ELRAT Lab, the key guest, circus artist and performer Daniel Simu, joined to engage in an interaction with a KUKA robot. In response to the performance of Simu and the KUKA, the general aim had been to address the theme of human-robot interaction with…

    December 2023   The overarching theme in which the ELRAT group is engaged in the first half of 2023-2024 is interaction; specifically, between KUKA robotics and puppetry as well as other entities. In the first sprint event of this year, we explored how a puppet named Madama Butterfly interacts with two KUKA robotic…