On 2 September 2021, Maaike Bleeker and Ulrike Quade discussed their project Acting Like a Robot as part of ‘NTF Pro’ at Nederlands Theater Festival. Here they talked about how collaboration between theatre and robotics can lead to mutual development and inspiration. See the video of this conversation below (in Dutch)!     Description (see…

  On 16 September 2021, Maaike Bleeker was invited on “Focus” (NPO Radio 1) to introduce Acting Like a Robot and the project’s collaboration with Bram Ellens’ exhibition Robots in Captivity. Click here to listen to the full interview (in Dutch)!     Description (See below for English) Het project Acting Like a Robot verkent…

  Marit Adriaanse   On Thursday the 10th of February the sixth sprint of the collaborative project between Bram Ellens and the Ulrike Quade Company for Floriade 2022, which is part of the Acting Like a Robot research project, took place in Almere. The session started with the invitation to the attendees to watch the…

  Soyun Jang     Neo the robot baby was born on 15 October 2021 at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. He was transported afterwards to Buitenplaats Doornburg, Maarsen, to be displayed at Bram Ellens’ exhibition, Robots in Captivity. Neo is a copy of a robot baby developed by Agoston E. Eiben (professor of computational intelligence at…

  Soyun Jang   On 9 September 2021, we witnessed the making process of robot specimens. Created by a collaborating artist of Acting Like a Robot, Bram Ellens, they are on display at his exhibition Robots in Captivity at Buitenplaats Doornburgh since late September.       Workshop: Anatomy Theatre Members of Performing Robots contributed…

  Ruowen Xu     Here’s what’s thrown at you when you walk along the alley to the robot prisoners with Bram for the first time: before you can take a decent look at anything at all behind the fervent audience of adults and many children, it is a shrill and loud whipping sound that…

  Floor Mijland     From a distance you hear a rattling sound, as if chains are dragged along a concrete floor. The sound bounces off the walls of what seems to be a large, empty hall. It creates loud echoes, which are accompanied by the sound of what could, possibly, be a mechanic drill….

  Meet Bram Ellens, collaborating artist of our project, Acting Like a Robot. Based in the Netherlands, Bram worked for 10 years as an entrepreneur before making his career transition into an artist. Working under Edward Bernteyn as his first job as an artist, as well as spending time with different mentors and self-studying, he…

Irene Alcubilla Troughton     In this project, Acting like a Robot collaborates with Ulrike Quade (director of the Ulrike Quade Company) in the exploration of the relationship between robot and puppet, as well as programmer and puppeteer. The goal of this project is two-fold: on the one hand, it tries to explore the theatrical…

Soyun Jang   Some members of Acting Like a Robot participated in two workshops with Bram Ellens to redesign the movement segments of one of the robots on display in his exhibition, Robots in Captivity, where he explores the relationship between robots and humans. Here, each robot displayed has its own backstory, such as what…