How will we live together with robots? During the Highlight Symposium ‘Robotic Relations’ on 13 February 2026, Maaike Bleeker, Ulrike Quade and Marco Rozendaal facilitated two sessions. Through talks, panels, and interactive installations, they explored whether robots can become extensions of human creativity, how we might understand robots as more-than-tools, and what happens when we

Recently, the online Performing Robots Catalogue was published. This catalogue is a living archive of projects, artworks, performances and experiments which combine theatre and robotics. It is part of the larger research project Dramaturgy for Devices.In order to organize the different projects within the catalogue, we have created a taxonomy with relevant categories and sub-categories.

VU Lecture by Laura Karreman and Ulrike Quade | Blog by Bianca Gotti On December 1st, 2025, Dr. Laura Karreman—Associate Professor in Media and Performance Studies at Utrecht University (UU)—and Ulrike Quade—theater director, artistic researcher, puppeteer, and scenographer—gave a lecture at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (VU) titled The Dramaturgy of Robots on Stage. The lecture

On Friday 6 February, Dramaturgy for Devices and Robotstories | Expanding Narratives will be organizing a collaborative exploration of Prompts & Theater. With the advent of LLMs, the concept of “prompt” has entered the HRI vocabulary. However, in the theater domain, formulas and systems resembling what a prompt might be for AI have been in

by Soyun Jang In November 2025, I visited the Centre for Transformative Media Technology at Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia, for a 15-day research exchange. Recently having moved to a new location, the centre had acquired a large studio space for a motion capture system, social robotics, and a volumetric capture system. While

Science and theatre seem like two different worlds. Yet theatre can tell us something about what our future with robots will look like. ‘Theatre knowledge is relevant to robot development.’ Daan Appels wrote a series about feelings for robots for NEMO Kennislink, the journalistic platform of NEMO Science Museum. In his first article, he talks

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

ELRAT | European Lab for Robots in Arts and Theatre

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

Robots are an increasingly part of our daily lives. They help provide medical care, care for our homes and gardens, and support education and the workplace. They are increasingly able to perform simple tasks and convey messages, but they also lack many skills needed for interaction and communication. In research project Dramaturgy for Devices, researchers