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…

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…