Performing Robots

Blog Posts

Ike Alone in the City

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…

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Touchy Robots: Developments in Social Robotics and Robotic Art

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…

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Unproductive and Misbehaving Machines: Exploration of Atypical Robots Through Art

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…

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Performing Robots Conference: (Human) being, striving for perfection

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…

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Performing Robots Conference: Walking Through an Uncanny Valley

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…

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Expert Meeting on Robotic Development

Nadine Grinberg & Swantje Schaeuble Imagine: A woman brings her boyfriend to work every day. They take the metro together. She takes care he doesn’t fall but somehow he also appears independent. He makes a rigid but friendly impression. In fact, he would seem over-alert if it wasn’t for that slight, endearing smile. ’He’ is…

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