On the 16th of May, 2019, the first two volumes of the new book series Thinking Through Theatre were launched: Thinking Through Theatre and Performance, edited by Joe Kelleher (Roehampton University, London), Adrian Kear (University of the Arts, London), Heike Roms (University of Exeter, UK) and Maaike Bleeker (Utrecht University) and Nomadic Theatre: Mobilizing Theory…

In her book Travelling Concepts in the Humanities: A Rough Guide, Mieke Bal (2002) presents us with a particular way to understand the performance of concepts and its relation with subjects and objects. She argues that concepts are not fixed as they travel between disciplines, individual scholars, geographically dispersed academic communities and so on. Therefore,…

The Uncanny Valley is a concept coined by Masahiro Mori and borrowed by theatre director Stephan Kaegi[i] to make a homonymic performance. This concept is used to explain the dip in human’s affinity and affective pairing in relation to a replica’s human likeness. The valley’s dip is produced when an apparently human-like replica, for example…

While attending and participating in the Performing Robots Conference I have been thinking a lot about the relation between humans and robots and the different kind of questions that emerge out of this relation. In most of the panels, lectures, and performances this relation – or interaction – was used as a starting point for…

At the Performing Robots Conference, in collaboration with SPRING Performing Arts Festival, we are looking for enthusiastic volunteers to join our team! It will be a great opportunity for you to meet people with similar interests, as well as artists and scholars of the field, and for you to enjoy a creative environment. Volunteers are…

Arun Saldanha’s lecture, which was called Stratification of cyberspace: from experience to waste, was for me a step outside of my academic comfort zone. In my own research, I focus mainly on theatre and spectatorship which I am exploring through a cognitive neuroscientific lens. This does not mean that Saldanha did not address interesting and…

When speaking about digital media and cyberspace, we—scholars, critics, users—still tend to forget that even the most ephemeral-seeming media have a material past, present, and future. While this kind of alienation is a problem of all consumption under global capitalism, awareness of the specific histories of digital commodities like videogames strikes me as only a…

What is the connection between technology, environment, and race? Are the utopic promises of an inclusive space in the ‘technosphere’[1] impossible to reach? Is it time to question how the stratification of cyberspace leads to an uneven distribution of global scale? Arun Saldanha reflected upon some aspects of these questions. The title of his presentation…

Offered by the Centre for the Humanities and Transmission in Motion, in collaboration with NICA and SPRING Performing Arts Festival.  In this masterclass, Prof. Peter Eckersall (CUNY, New York) will consider the theory and practice of new media dramaturgy.  As developed his recent book (co-authored with Edward Scheer and Helena Grehan), new media dramaturgy (NMD)…

Let me start by saying that Tim Ingold gave an interesting talk – “On doing undergoing: Experience, Imagination and the Principle of Habit” – about what it means to do something habitually and to master a certain skill, which also raises more general questions about attention & intention, embodiment and cognitive systems. For Ingold, doing…