“If, as Shakespeare famously claimed, ‘All the world’s a stage and all the men and women merely players’, robots are the new kids on the block.” Prof. dr. Maaike Bleeker (Utrecht University) The podcast ‘Acting Like A Robot’ is about the research of the same name within which the VU, UU, HKU and Ulrike Quade…

On 4 March 2025, Maaike Bleeker presented the paper ‘The Human-Robot Ensemble: Designing Expressive Movements for Restaurant Service Robots’, written by Hyumin Lee, Nazli Cila, Klaas Koerten, Maaike Bleeker and Marco Rozendaal, at the HRI’25 in Melbourne. HRI’25 is the 20th edition of the ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction. At HRI, researchers and practitioners

The Centre for Transformative Media Technologies (Swinburne University of Technology, Australia) invites you to attend a presentation by  Professor Maaike Bleeker – Utrecht University  “In this presentation, I will share experiences from several years of collaboration in which we brought together expertise from the arts and theatre, robotics, and academic research and invited guests with…

ELRAT | European Lab for Robots in Arts and Theatre

What does it take to move a robot? Acting Like a RobotFilm: The Transketeers Special thanks to Stadsschouwburg Utrecht

ELRAT | European Lab for Robots in Arts and Theatre

Pick me up, kick me out!  On 21 February 2025, the Dutch newspaper NRC published an interview with Maaike Bleeker on the research project Acting Like a Robot, which concluded festively on 31 January 2025 at De Paardenkathedraal. Read the article here (in Dutch)

This Lorentz workshop explores how a performative lens can help roboticists, healthcare professionals, designers, and other academics and practitioners better understand the complexities of integrating robotics into care practices. A performative perspective approaches technology as inherently relational and frames robot capacities as expressions manifested through their appearance, motion, and behaviour within specific contexts of use,…

Designing Human-Robot Encounters for the CTRL + ALT + PLAY event | By Pascalle Paumen From November 28 to November 30, 2024, researchers of the Dramaturgy for Devices project gathered in Utrecht for a second joint workshop to experiment with human-robot interactions. This time, we explored designing with and for encounters using the Rober robot

We invite you to the closing events of our research project, Acting Like a Robot: Theater as Testbed for the Robot Revolution, on January 30 and 31, 2025, in De Paardenkathedraal in Utrecht. In this special collaboration of Utrecht University, Ulrike Quade Company, VU Amsterdam, HKU, and SPRING Performing Arts Festival, we have spent the…