Embrace Angels

show overview
Performance & Installation
start research October 2024
Nottingham, Amsterdam,
- Mixed Reality Lab (MRL), University of Nottingham (UK). Prof. Steve Benford. - UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) Turing AI World-Leading Researcher Fellowship. - ass.Prof. A. Block (Case Western University USA) in collaboration with Max Planck Institute (DE). - Animation in collaboration with Sander Bos (NL). - LiMa Living Media Art Platform Amsterdam - Mondriaan Fund - Creative Industries Fund NL

Can humans and robots embrace each other? Can an A.I. learn to embrace? Will A.I. learn humans to embrace each other in the future?
Or can we imagine intimately hugging in a sensitive, more than human-machine synthesizing ritual?

Embrace Angels is created in the context of A.I. driven social relationships, global wars and climate injustice. During 2024-2026, we will explore concepts of robotics, performance art and neuroscience, to radically reshape the warrior and media icon robot Spot into an empathizer, for a collaborative worldwide poetic embracing ritual.

For our new exciting research project and playful performance installation Embrace Angels, we intensively collaborate with a fantastic international multidisciplinary team, to explore an innovative, collective ritual that weaves our cyborg bodies with creative and responsible A.I., A.R., robotics, social haptics and body sensors.

Do you trust to be embraced by robots? Can robots give consent?
This social-technical experiment puts center stage performativity and inclusive ethics for ecologies of intimacy, responsibility and reconciliation, play and ambiguity, risk and trust. It invites our vulnerable, hybrid angel bodies to meet with flexible body boundaries, in (tender) collision evoked by the three Laws of Robotics as defined by science fiction author Isaac Asimov.

We look forward to share with you these experiments at the upcoming international presentations in the near future.

In collaboration with:
● Mixed Reality Lab and the cobot maker space, University of Nottingham (UK) supported by Prof. Steve's Benford's (UKRI) Turing A.I. research Fellowship;
● Platform for Living Media Art LI-MA Amsterdam (NL);
● University of Exeter for Performance and New Media Art (UK);
the Max Planck Institute Stuttgart (DE) / Case Western University (USA);
● KTH Royal Institute of Technology Sweden - research into ethics and soma-design;
● University of Delft - research into social touch interaction.
● Supported by the Creative Industries Fund NL and Mondriaan Fund (NL).