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…

As someone studying artistic research – what it is, how it operates, to what ends – I often find myself curious about the invisible line that seems to have been drawn between artistic research and activism. To what extent can a practice that is developed with the intention of disrupting ideas, processes or systems, one…

  “I am German, white, and catholic baptised; that’s a complex starter kit,” observes theatre maker Julian Hetzel in a press release for his creation Schuldfabrik (2017). Hetzel is well aware of his privileged position, and his observation is not a complaint. Rather, it addresses the complexity of being implicated and how this affects his…

  “The Architecture of Staged Realities” looks at Walt Disney’s legacy as a mirror of contemporary society and its cultural production, both in terms of identity construction, infrastructures of implicatedness and the architectures this generated. In her talk creative practitioner Saskia van Stein will merge topics of interest from the perspective of her role as…

  Understanding the social happenings as co-emergent, rather than embodying a linear causality, is crucial to form productive and generative practices in a world where epistemological foundations and material basis are constantly shifting. Chris Julien started his lecture by bringing in the way in which productive and potentially revolutionary practices can be situated in the…

by Ani Encheva “What is no longer archived in the same way is no longer lived in the same way.” – Jacques Derrida (1995, 18)   As colonial archives become digitized, what new sites of silence and forgetfulness emerge? How do contemporary visual art practices engage with Danish colonial history to trace and make sense…