On the 23d of May 2018, we were invited to the “lecture-performance” by Jon McKenzie and Aneta Stojnic with a peculiar title “Thought-Action Figures”. Prior to lecture, we received preparatory material that consisted of a comic with the same name and some of the philosophical thoughts/quotes from the event. In the beginning of the performance,…

In our last session of Transmission in Motion Seminar, we had the chance to assist a performance-lecture given by John McKenzie and Aneta Stojnic based on what was called “thought-action figures”. This proposition (in lack of a better term) was introduced in an attempt to search for a post-conceptual, post-ideational knowledge that could break down…

Last week I visited a rehearsal of the performance of WIEK, which was originally created by Boukje Schweigman in 2009. In this performance, three performers move in interaction with a moving object which has the shape of three wings of a mill (see the picture above). This performance will be performed again next month, with…

New lines of scholarship focused on perception in the last years have become preoccupied not only with the influence of the body in this act but also in its essential position for understanding how perception in itself is constituted. Among those, Alva Noe stands as a prominent thinker. In his renown book Action in Perception…

Corporeal literacy was the main buzzword of Maaike Bleeker’s lecture, as she discusses how we can rethink the understanding of our bodies, bodily responses and body-mind relationship. The discourse she presents breaks with the dominant Cartesian school of thought, so effectively summarized by his cogito ergo sum adagio. We are not just simply our brains,…

During the last session of Transmission in Motion Emilia Barakova and Roos van Berkel gave a workshop on “Expressive Movement as a Universal Language between Humans and Social Robots.” But actually, it was more than the two of them, since they also brought Pleo with them, an animatronic pet dinosaur, which has been used in…

Roos van Berkel and Emilia Barakova’s lecture offered a very fresh perspective on the diverse ways that human and robots can interact, but also the affective potential movement regardless of who or what is generating it. What I found particularly fascinating was how the dinosaur robot (PLEO) that the researchers offered to the audience to…

This morning I heard on the news that a hospital in a city in the Netherlands started an experiment with healthcare-robots that asks the patient questions to get an indication of the illness of the patient. It wasn’t clear how the robot exactly functions, but it seemed as if the robot only interacts with the…

In the lecture given by Emilia Barakova and Roos van Berkel about the importance of expressive movement in social robotics and, consequently, in human-robot interactions, two notions caught my attention from the beginning: anthropomorphic and humane robots. In an extremely interesting distinction between them, the two scholars tried to understand how a robot can or…

There is a lot of argument these days when it comes to robots. This topic has become especially actively discussed in recent years, as AI and robotics are no longer in distant future. FESTO with a myriad of insect and animal robots that move just like their prototypes, Boston Dynamics’ with their series of robots…