On Julian Hetzel in Conversation with Maaike Bleeker by Ani Encheva   “No moral, individual and personal, standards of conduct will ever be able to excuse us from collective responsibility. This vicarious responsibility for things we have not done, this taking upon ourselves the consequences for things we are entirely innocent of, is the price…

  In the seminar, “Science as an adventure”, Simon Gusman explored how adventure serves as a powerful trope that frames various aspects of human experience. Adventure is everywhere—found in advertisements, games, recruitment materials, and even the way we narrate our personal lives. This idea intrigued me, particularly in relation to the metaphor of the cave…

  “Never work with kids and animals” A report from Theatre of Research by Sybille Peters When we asked 120 children to become programming directors of our theatre in 2016, what they mostly wanted to book, were animal acts. They said they missed animals. They said that, other than in the zoo, in the theatre…

  This interactive session takes inspiration from the Centre for Art and the Political Imaginary (CAPIm), the first Swedish Centre of Excellence in the field of Artistic Research that is based at two institutions of higher education in art: HDK-Valand – Academy of Art and Design (Gothenburg) and Royal Institute of Art (Stockholm). CAPIm is…

  Just think along: in (western) modernity, simply put, artistic production was characterized as innovative, creative, and original—thus clearly distinguished from non-creative, repetitive, industrial work. In so-called contemporary art, it could be said, this distinction has been eliminated; just take the example of “creative industries.” If artists have today lost the position that separated them

  How can we rethink the futures of technology beyond the narrow visions shaped by Big Tech? Join us in exploring imaginative, creative, and situated technological practices that challenge the dominant narratives around emerging technologies like blockchain and artificial intelligence. Powerful tech actors continuously present their visions for the future of technology, framing them as…

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 past…

On Wednesday 29 January, Irene Alcubilla Troughton will defend her PhD dissertation “Moving Together: A Performing Arts Approach to Human-Robot Interaction Design”. This dissertation tackles an important challenge in human-robot interaction (HRI): how to create meaningful encounters between humans and robots through movement. Traditionally, HRI has focused on what this thesis categorises as an “internalist” approach, wherein movement is used to convey and interpret internal…

  On Monday 3 February 2025, Inte Gloerich will defend her PhD dissertation “Reimagining the Truth Machine: Blockchain Imaginaries Between the Rational and the More-than-Rational.” In her thesis, Gloerich explores the widespread idea of blockchain as a ‘truth machine.’ Blockchain and the post-truth era Blockchain is a technology that stores data in digital ‘blocks’, linked together in…

by Jenny Chan   In the seminar “Everyday Activism in Times of Collapse: Bridging the Personal and the Planetary”, Chris Julien explicated how theory and practice are interrelated under the current ecological conditions. Through theory and practice, Julien explored our implicated positioning and different ways of engaging with the world. Julien first drew from Markus…