Robots zullen een steeds belangrijkere rol gaan spelen ons dagelijks leven thuis, op school, in de zorg, en in allerlei dienstverlenende functies. Die rollen vragen om goede communicatie. Dit project onderzoekt hoe samenwerking tussen theater en robotica kan bijdragen aan het ontwikkelen van de communicatieve vaardigheden van robots.

• Irene Alcubilla Troughton

• Prof. Dr. Koen Hindriks (VU)
• Nirav Christophe (HKU)
• Ulrike Quade (Ulrike Quade Company)

Rock/Body brings together researchers from the humanities, social sciences, health and earth sciences alongside artists to investigate the human body as a site that exists in continuity with – rather than cut away from – the geologic. It aims to move beyond the nature/culture divide geologically, by taking performing human bodies as both expressions of geological matter and forces, and prime sites of exposure and response to changes in the dynamics of earth systems. 

Departing from the tension presented in the film Billy Elliot between the hard-labouring landscape of coal extraction and the seemingly feminine or emasculating middle-class and urban world of ballet-dancing, Rock/Body examines the ways in which the labouring bodies of miners and quarrymen and the performing bodies of dancers might, when thought together rather than separately, constitute privileged sites for exploring how geology and biology might converge in concrete human bodies and affect their forms of cultural production. Further, and given the way in which a universal “humanity” has been uncritically posited as dominant geological agent in recent scientific discourses, the project will also focus on concrete bodies in order to problematise such universalising conception of humanity and open it up to existing scholarly debates on race, class, gender, sexuality, and ability, and the ways in which differentiated bodies might be differently vulnerable to changing earth processes and possess different affordances when it comes to their ability to act as geological agents.

To adequately address those issues calls for collaborative cross- and inter-disciplinary approaches supported by scholars, scientists, and creative practitioners who are seldom given the chance to exchange knowledge and methodologies with one another in a non-hierarchical manner.

• Dr João Florêncio (University of Exeter) PI
• Professor Nigel Clark (Lancaster University) CI
• other participants: http://rockbody.exeter.ac.uk/people/

• Dr Petra Gemeinboeck (UNSW)
• Dr Robert Saunders (UNSW)
• Dr Ben Robins.

The objective of this project was to bring together an international, interdisciplinary group of researchers from the human, social, and exact sciences as well as artists, visual technicians and planetarium professionals to investigate the history, present state and future of popular astronomical spectacles. Through an historical study and experimental digital reconstruction of planetarium performances since the early 19th century, we wanted to analyse a particularly important locus where spatial and visual cultures of modernity were elaborated and experienced at the intersection of science, technology and spectacle.  

We looked into the material and technological characteristics of these devices, their social and cultural context but also their perception and experience by different audiences. Thereby we also sought to develop new approaches and methodologies for studying visual cultures : science performances are a perfect object to initiate a conversation between history of science and performance studies, fields that have mostly ignored each other so far. 

Integrating perspectives from art history, cultural studies and theory, communication and museum studies, this conversation sharpened thinking about, e.g. the performativity of images, how to analyse their experience and if and how they stimulate belief. The experimental component explored the value of digital reconstructions of historical devices for academic investigation in fields related to visual studies and provided an opening to public thinking about these issues, including about their practical implementation for science communication in or as future planetariums. 

• Charlotte Bigg (CNRS
• Centre Alexandre Koyré
• Paris) PI
• Kurt Vanhoutte (University of Antwerp) CI
• Eric Joris (new media artist /CREW
• Bruxelles)
• Prof. David Aubin ( l’Université Pierre et Marie Curie
• Paris / Institut de mathématiques de Jussieu)
• Dr. Nele Wynants (Université Libre de Bruxelles / University of Antwerp)
• Dr. Sébastien Soubiran (Jardin des Sciences
• Université de Strasbourg)

The central hypothesis of the New Media Dramaturgy research project was that the merging of new media and performance calls for a different approach to understanding composition in the making of performance and the spectator’s role in the reception of performance. NMD is the name we used to designate both the composition of this kind of performance in and through new media art works, and its effects on an audience. NMD as we formulated it is a new framework for analysing and documenting contemporary trends in live performance including theatre, dance, video performance and installation at a crucial moment in the transformation of these forms. Increasingly complex connections between live performance and new media technologies are developing, and this project will contribute to, and enhance scholarly understanding and creative application of these connections. To this end the NMD project had three interrelated aims:

1. To examine the use and the effect of new media technologies in contemporary theatre and performance, analysing the methods of composition in recent examples of significant performance works;
2. To critically analyse how these technologies are in turn informing or changing forms of performance;
3. To explore how the synthesis of new dramaturgy (Kerkhoven) and new media has changed the experience of live arts for the spectator.

https://newmediadramaturgy.wordpress.com/

• Prof Edward Scheer (University of New South Wales
• project leader)
• A/Prof Peter Eckersall (Melbourne)
• A/Prof Helena Grehan (Murdoch)
• Assistant Prof Marin Blazevic (Zagreb).

The aim of this project is to rethink processes of semiosis in the theatre in order to develop a conception of the spectator as body involved with the theatrical event through several perceptual systems simultaneously. The goal is to rethink the subject of semiotics (Kaja Silverman) in bodily terms and do so ‘through the theatre’, i.e. using the theatre as a ‘theoretical object’ to explore the embodied aspects of experience and meaning making.
One of the premises of the project is that sense experience as well as making meaning through the senses, are culturally specific practices. Here J.J. Gibson’s account of the senses as perceptual systems provide a point of connection between an understanding of the senses as actively involved in ‘world making’ (Goodman) and an understanding of sense experience as culturally specific practice.
This also raises the question how to think the relationship between perception and cognition. Here, Brian Massumi’s elaboration of Deleuzian ideas of flow and movement presents an approach that starts from the primacy of movement. Massumi then demonstrates how accepting this primacy allows for a reconsideration of experience and meaning making in terms of perceptual cognition and cognitive perception. His notion of mirror vision (as opposed to movement vision) allows for a further reconceptualization of Silverman’s psychoanalytical approach to the subject of semiotics (as well as her critique of some of the implications of this notion of subjectivity) while also presenting a point of connection with the theatre as a culturally specific practice of constructing experiences and making meaning.

Results so far:
- Reading group Corporeal Literacies
- Soirees on Synaesthesia (Feb.-March 2006)
- International conference The Anatomical Theatre Revisited (2006)
- Installing the Body. Special issue of Parallax (# 46, 2008)
- Book publication Anatomy Live. Performance and the Operating Theatre (2008)
- various lectures and articles