Suze van Miltenburg In December we (prof. K. Hindriks VU en Suze van Miltenburg UQC) set up a new exchange linked to the Social Intelligence Robot Project at the VU. The initial idea was to work with students on the topic ‘coming alive’ and work from the analogy between puppets and robots. Due to a…

Arianne Koeleman On the 29th of July I attended a short demonstration of the artist Tim Hammer at Theater aan de Rijn in Arnhem. This demonstration was created as a means to bring together roboticists and theatre makers (especially those working with puppets) to be inspired and discussed about a common topic: making lifeless objects…

Marijke Hessels The tenth of july was a first for a lot of things. Research collaborators of the Acting Like A Robot project Ulrike Quade and Koen Hindriks met again in real life, after a period of online meetings as we have all grown accustomed to. A short and experimental new module for students of…

Suze van Miltenburg   Friday 19th I was invited by Koen Hindriks to give an injection of inspiration to the master students joining a project on expressive robot behaviors at the VU (Socially Intelligent Robotics Workshop). With this report I briefly share and document some elements I shared during this exchange. This first exchange between…

“A Robot Walked Into the Theatre…” is the virtual kick-off of Acting Like a Robot: Theatre as Testbed for the Robot Revolution. This project brings together experts from the theatre and robotics for four years of joint explorations. Acting Like a Robot is a collaboration between Utrecht University, Ulrike Quade Company, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, HKU…

Gabriel Casanova Miralda Art in pandemic times. The worldwide quarantine to fight against Covid is an experience that has changed the course of history. Everybody, and every aspect of society will be different from now on. We artists, as everyone else, face the fact that our plans changed. We all are forced to slow down…

Irene Alcubilla Troughton The fact that senses are organised under a hierarchy through which some of them are given more importance is not something new. Throughout history, vision, for example, has held a privilege position, followed by sound, and leaving the rest of senses far behind. In the last years, the humanities have explored what…

Irene Alcubilla Troughton As Stelarc (2014) rightfully puts in a talk called “Error, function and behaviour”, the term “misbehaving”, as opposed to “malfunctioning”, requires certain intentionality and agency. “Misbehaving”, he proposes, can only happen in the presence of someone, whereas “malfunctioning” could take place in the absence of a person, as it relates to an…

Gido Broers While attending and participating in the Performing Robots Conference I have been thinking a lot about the relation between humans and robots and the different kind of questions that emerge out of this relation. In most of the panels, lectures, and performances this relation – or interaction – was used as a starting…

Jose Hopkins B The Uncanny Valley is a concept coined by Masahiro Mori and borrowed by theatre director Stephan Kaegi[i] to make a homonymic performance. This concept is used to explain the dip in human’s affinity and affective pairing in relation to a replica’s human likeness. The valley’s dip is produced when an apparently human-like…