This article examines how contemporary digital performance reactivates and transforms avant-garde techniques to produce politically subversive modes of spectatorship. Through four case studies - Riccardo Reina's Alle Armi (Italy), Rafik Jebali's Le Fou (Tunisia), Einat Weizman's How to Make a Revolution (Palestine), and Nisha Abdulla's How Long is February? (India) - the article analyses how estrangement, montage, mediated embodiment and formal fragmentation are recalibrated through digital media to interrogate militarism, state violence, juridical repression and communal conflict. Drawing on scholarship by Dixon, Bay-Cheng, Causey and Giannachi, it argues that digital performance extends the avant-garde's anti-illusionist project by exposing representational apparatuses and reorganising spectatorship as an act of critical witnessing. Rather than treating these works as instances of technological innovation, the article situates them as culturally specific adaptations of avant-garde strategies that acquire new political resonance in Mediterranean, Middle Eastern and South Asian contexts. It proposes that digitally inflected avant-gardisms constitute a significant mode of contemporary subversive performance, where political force emerges not only from thematic content but from the formal and perceptual disruptions generated through digital mediation.
This essay examines how digital live performance can teach us to navigate the psychological and ethical entanglements of everyday AI use. The essay opens with the tragic case of Sewell Setzer III alongside more ordinary encounters - accepting chatbot apologies or sustaining conversations - encounters in which imagination, rather than belief, motivates action. Such interactions expose the limits of platform disclaimers ('this is fiction') and reveal the need for new forms of audience literacy when relating to artificial agents. Drawing on Anna Ichino's philosophy of imagination and belief, I argue that users engage through an act of fiction that is neither credulous nor detached: imagination itself moves them to act without requiring belief in machine consciousness. I turn to Choy Ka Fai's Yishun is Burning as a live demonstration of this literacy in practice. Combining motion-capture avatars, documentary fragments, and ritual gesture, Choy's performance operates as a digital system in its own right, training spectators to recognize how imagination can animate without deceiving. Through this analysis - chatbot, philosophy, performance - the essay reframes digital theater as a pedagogical technology for AI literacy and proposes performance as a method for understanding, and ethically coexisting with, artificial intelligence.
This paper analyses the Klavierautomat (piano automaton), a robotic piano player, framing it as a complex cultural artefact with a productive aesthetic and philosophical ambiguity. The analysis synthesises insights from the philosophy of technology, media theory, and hauntology to theorise the tension between the instrument's material presence and its spectral effects. This theoretical framework is explored through two original, practice-based case studies. The first, Et & uuml;den f & uuml;r Klavierautomat, showcases the instrument's capacity for inhuman precision and speed, realising a technological sublime of computational perfection. In contrast, the second study, Stuttering Calls of the Unencoded, leverages systemic failure and feedback loops, exposing the Klavierautomat as a medium for a hauntological sublime found in the glitches and spectral residues of a flawed digital-mechanical translation process. The tension between these two artistic approaches reveals a wide aesthetic range of the instrument, from a tool for realising flawless logic to a medium for channelling hauntological imperfection. This capacity renders the Klavierautomat a liminal object, one that gives physical and acoustic form to algorithmic processes while staging the spectral haunting of its own mechanical nature.
Humour is a compelling mechanism for fostering user acceptance and enhancing quality of human-robot interaction, yet its deployment in robots remains a complex challenge due to its cultural dependence on expressive nuance. While cultural robotics has illuminated the influence of cultural norms on user perceptions of social robots, little attention has been given to humour as a culturally adaptive interface. This study addresses this gap by presenting a culturally specific stand-up comedian robot that integrated prompt-based personality design tailored to distinct cultural contexts and emotional expressions. Drawing on theories from robotic comedy, computational humour, cultural robotics and personality design, we investigate two central research questions: How can robots better adapt to audiences in the UK through culture-specific humorous personality? and How can robots incorporate non-verbal expressions to enhance the robot's humorous perception from the audience? Building on the prior work, we evaluated three culturally distinct comedic personas - qtComedian, Jackerbot (British) and Hirobot (Japanese) in a live performance setting. Findings reveal that culturally specific language, slang and topical cues significantly shape audience perception, and synchronised facial, gestural and verbal expressions amplify comedic impact. These results contribute to emerging discourses on cultural embodiment in robotic performance and offer methodological insights for designing socially resonant robot personalities.
This article examines how performative togetherness is constructed in a technologically mediated music-dance performance environment. While togetherness is often associated with co-presence and effortless flow, networked contexts introduce perceptual reconfiguration that makes it fragile and effortful. We present the research concert Telematic@PopSenteret, a networked performance involving dancers and musicians distributed across two floors in a museum, connected through audio-video transmission. Using interviews and audio-video recordings, we explore how latency, fractured perception, and the absence of bodily cues transformed the performers' coordination and induced cognitive strain. We discuss how performative togetherness - defined as the sense of shared meaning-making that emerges through attentional, sensory, and adaptive negotiation - was maintained during the performance.
This article explores the intersection of creative robotics and the performing arts and proposes a new conceptual framework of the Human-Robot-Recipient Triangle, or the HRoR Triangle. It is inspired by Jacques Lacan's theory of desire, which examines how the subject-fragmented and incomplete-seeks wholeness through an unattainable, desired object. The HRoR Triangle interrogates the fundamental contradiction in anthropomorphic interactions with robots: performers and audiences attribute human-like qualities to robotic entities-despite their lack of consciousness or intentionality-while the Recipient's observational role introduces an additional layer of interpretation. This triadic relationship underscores how anthropomorphic projection not only informs the aesthetic and emotional dimensions of human-robot performance but also reflects broader epistemological questions regarding agency, empathy, and the boundaries between human and machine. Based on arts-based research and analysis of excerpts from choreography reports for The Berlioz Project, Underbody, and SPOTSHOTBEUYS, I examine two critical themes: The 'paradox of presence', which explores the tensions between a performer, a non-human moving body, and the recipient's perception and the 'empathy dilemma' addresses the challenge recipients have in empathizing with non-human entities. Choreography, introduced as a transfer of meaning, guides recipients' interpretations of movement and interaction, illustrating the HRoR Triangle's role in shaping relationships.
This article presents a guide to designing, building, and staging drone puppets, flying characters that integrate mechatronic design with expressive motion. Drawing on traditions of puppetry, the authors explore how aerial robotics can embody dramatic gesture and convey narrative intent. The process is illustrated through Isabella's Flight, a 15-minute performance in which two airborne characters enact a story of tyranny and resistance. Through an examination of the piece's technical and performative dimensions, the article offers insights into the emerging language of drone puppetry and its capacity to extend the vocabulary of aerial performance beyond the large-scale light shows that treat drones as pixels.
We introduce our robot theatre, Alloyed Bodies, and how it scales into a participatory design platform, the HRX Theatre, to reimagine our relationships with robots through more-than-human entanglements that mobilise transcorporeal resonance between radically different embodiments. Alloyed Bodies establishes a distinct form of robot theatre by enacting the diffractive dramaturgy of bodying-thinging, dynamically manifesting how bodies and things co-constitute each other. Three dance performers, three cube costumes, and one robotic cube performer become increasingly entangled through transcorporeal attunement, navigating the tension between promoting emergence and technical constraints through choreographic scores that elastically scaffold resonant alliances. The HRX Theatre scales this theatre-making practice into a participatory design methodology, expanding human-robot interaction design through transcorporeal perspective-taking and embodied prototyping. Unfolding through four embodied attunement stages - from cultivating kinaesthetic awareness to collaborative more-than-human scenario-making - we discuss how participants' perceptions of machinelike artefacts shift from 'objects' to 'co-performers'. Deeply integrating creative robotics, dance knowledges, and feminist politics, we argue how making oddkin with robots opens a radically more expansive playground for human-robot interaction design while promoting robot theatre as an embodied, more-than-human mode of inquiry.
Rings & mldr; Through Rings II is a performance research system that engages the historical erasure of Hong Kong's military cartographies through robotic drawing, laser-engraved discs, and AI-mediated sound. Central to the project is the concept of frictional historiography: a posthuman methodology that approaches memory through misalignment, material resistance, and machinic failure. Instead of following representational models of digital heritage, the work uses noise, drift, and breakdown as compositional tools. In this recursive ecology, comprising robotic plotters, laser-engraved discs, and AI synthesis, memory is not retrieved but enacted through instability. By integrating Somax2 and RAVE with material feedback loops, the system treats servo lag and stylus drag as generative constraints. Failure and sonic hallucination function as epistemic strategies, transforming the archive into a volatile, performative terrain. The project contributes to posthuman performance, machine listening, and experimental media archaeology by advancing misremembrance as a method for engaging with histories shaped by loss, erasure, and uncertainty.
In the late twentieth century, many cyber-culture theorists treated the relationship between virtual cyberspace and physical space in dualistic terms, ignoring the significance of the body in 'virtual reality.' This research, however, argues that virtuality does not exist in a domain separate from bodily experience, but rather that a specific 'virtual dimension' emerges when the body is present in digital contexts (i.e. digital embodiment). Moreover, virtual reality technology and associated immersive media cannot be considered merely technological; instead, they must be understood as forming a particular impression on the audience, thereby becoming 'aesthetic technology.' This article further contends that the current growth of virtual art cannot distinguish 'virtual' and 'real' through a dualistic perspective, starting with the current trend of new materialism. The definition and extent of what is deemed 'real' under modern material civilization expand when audiences/ participants interact with virtual reality works, as their perception remains a real one. Consequently, a novel theory is put forth: 'virtual as new reality.' Therefore, virtual as a new reality signifies a shift toward relational aesthetics and a return to virtual reality as well as a reexamination of virtual aesthetics.
As museums increasingly recognize the importance of intangible cultural heritage, they have begun to meaningfully address musical themes in exhibitions. The shift toward visitor-centered approaches has acknowledged music as a powerful medium for audience engagement. Consequently, both curators and visitors show growing interest in sound art, creating a need for deeper understanding of sound's role and meaning within museum contexts. This study examines how Ragnar Kjartansson's sound art installation-work The Visitors, exhibited at the SFMoMA as part of the Soundtracks exhibition (2017-18), creates meaning through its integration of music, filmic imagery, and spatial elements. Through multimodal analysis and visitor interviews, I demonstrate how the installation represents music as a participatory experience, which is best conceptualized by Small's (1998) concept of musicking - understanding music as an activity rather than merely an object. I also situate the installation within sound art discourse, examining how it extends and challenges existing practices within this evolving field. My analysis of The Visitors supports two conclusions: the exhibition of music can achieve museum studies and practice's goals of a deeper visitor engagement; the installation work proves to be an effective representation of musicking and thus, an appealing instantiation of music studies knowledge displayed in a museum [Q4].
Robotic art provides a compelling lens through which to examine the design of human-robot encounters in theatrical contexts, offering insights that can inform our imaginaries of human - machine interactions and inspire HRI design beyond the stage. The robotic artworks addressed in this article adopt a relational approach, carefully curating multiple elements to guide interpretations of robotic behaviour and invite specific forms of interaction. Central to this are framing strategies involving mise-en-sc & egrave;ne and narratives, which often cast non-humanlike machines as vulnerable figures, prompting considerations of care in human - robot relations. At the same time, robotic artworks resist familiarization, emphasizing the robot's alterity through non-anthropomorphic forms and ambiguous, sometimes threatening behaviours. Through its use of framing strategies, robotic art offers valuable perspectives on how theatrical tools like narratives and mise-en-sc & egrave;ne can shape our perceptions of robots and inform relational approaches for designing interactions outside of the theatre space.
The themes of touch, contact and consent in relation to disability generate a lot of discussion and are brought further into view in the context of performance, and specifically dance performance. Disabled dance artists develop expertise that is particular to their own body, and if they dance with an assistive technology, such as a prosthesis, crutch or wheelchair, the dancer has additional expertise in how their corporeal body interfaces with non-human agents. If the non-human agent is a robot, questions around touch and consent may take on a different force. This article discusses a recent project that brought together an interdisciplinary team to ask questions about how expert disabled dancers encounter robots, and how bodily contact with robots can be generative and reimagine contact as creative, expressive and trustworthy, rather than potentially harmful. The discussion also asks whether AI offers an opportunity to develop more inclusive research methodologies, or whether it calls into sharp focus the inequalities if the lived experience of difference and diversity is overlooked.
