“The Soul is a Verb, Not a Noun” 

Author: Maaike Bleeker //

This paper proposes ensoulment as an artist-led relational approach to developing robot behavior. As an alternative to the more commonly used term animation, ensoulment offers a radical relational perspective on how to bring about a sense of personhood or character that starts from exploring the potential of puppets and robots for behavior and expressions as embodied in their morphology, and how this behavior affords interpretations and responses. This perspective aligns with a new materialist understanding of agency as a more-than-human phenomenon embodied within material configurations and their affective capacities. The paper traces our artist-led explorations of the ensoulment of robots in the creation of Ulrike Quade’s Okay, I’m AI-x and moments from a series of bi-weekly sprints in which we further investigated insights gained during this initial creation process. This paper specifically examines two lines of experimentation: one related to force, weight, and momentum, and the other to the sound produced by robotic movements.

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Reference
Bleeker, M. (2026). “The Soul is a Verb, Not a Noun” Ensoulment as an Artist-Led Relational Approach to Robot Behavior. In: Staffa, M., et al. Social Robotics + AI. ICSR+AI 2025. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 16133. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-95-2398-6_47