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…

  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…

  ** Link to event: UU & Academy: Open round table AI & the Arts (SPRING Academy and Utrecht University)   This AI and the arts round table discussion opened with the question, “What does AI do to the arts?” The interdisciplinary panelists offered insightful perspectives ranging from Dastani’s work with computational modeling of emotion to…

  ** Link to event: UU & Academy: Robots in SPRING (SPRING academy and Utrecht University)   In the Acting Like a Robot exhibition, researchers shared and workshopped their projects that explore what theater can contribute to robotics and what robotics can contribute to the theater.  These projects revealed the limitations of robots as thespians…

  How do we imagine the future of robots? What does it mean to share the world with them? In this podcast series, Luc de Groen examines together with scientists and artists what the future of social robotics will look like, and how could theatre – specifically object theatre – can inform this field. This…