Embrace Angels

Can humans and robots embrace each other? What A.I. model will shape our intimate embrace in the future? And in turn, do robots dream of embracing humans? What experience and memories will humans and robots share? Or can we imagine intimately hugging in a sensitive, more than human-machine synthesizing ritual? Embrace Angels critically rewires our cyborg bodies for a sustainable, collective intelligent bio-technical embracing ritual, for inclusive planetary love..

Performance Installation.
The immersive, participatory performance involves tender play and collision with protocols evoked by the three Laws of Robotics (as defined by science fiction author Isaac Asimov).
The audience is invited to slowly approach and entangle in a group hug with two industrial Franka arms. Their hugging arm movements are recorded, and transferred through prompting A.I. to generate poetic visual traces that inspire shared experience, memories, trust and meaning making in hybrid worlds.

Context. Embrace Angels is created in the context of A.I. driven social relationships, global wars and climate injustice. Ethics of Robot and AI design are often not taken seriously evoking a dystopic sense of future living. Our starting point is that robots should not replace humans ands their embraces. Instead, we need to find collaborative connections embracing humans and robots. In fact, autonomous robots have always products of (previous) collaboration between many people. And so are cultures of human experience. To stage the importance of such collaborations, Embrace Angels proposes a new form of group hug for humans and robots. And since the future has always been shaped by sharing socio-technical imaginaries, Embrace Angels is a experience and dialogue space for the future. Through testing, and embracing and hugging, we aim to fuel this space with a sense of hope.

Research. During 2024-2026, we will explore multiple concepts of robotics, performance art and neuroscience - to radically reshape industrial robotic arms (Franka arms) and warriors (Spot, Boston Dynamics) into empathizers. Conceptually, the project explores bodily entanglement; giving consent, trust and the social meaning of touching and feeling touched; shared memory of touch, whether robots can recognize and mediate social touch.
Do you trust to be embraced by robots? Can robots give consent?

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

Team work. For this new exciting research project and playful performance installation 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.
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).