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Hybrid Entanglements: a posthuman dramaturgy
for human-robot relationships
Petra Gemeinboeck, Rob Saunders
Centre for Transformative Media Technologies, Swinburne University of Technology (Melbourne, Australia)
Media Theory, University of Applied Arts Vienna (Vienna, Austria)
Leiden Institute of Advanced Computer Science, Leiden University (Leiden, The Netherlands)
pgemeinboeck@swin.edu.au, r.saunders@liacs.leidenuniv.nl
Abstract
This paper discusses our collaborative Machine Movement
Lab project harnessing movement to bodily empathize with
abstract machines. Bringing together creative robotics, chore-
ographic strategies, and a posthuman dramaturgical frame,
the project seeks to trouble our relationships with robots by
exploring them as more-than-human entanglements. The pa-
per discusses our transdisciplinary performance-making prac-
tice and underlying theoretical concepts and how they are mo-
bilized through emerging diffraction patterns mapping out
symbiotic relationships. An improvisational score involving
dancers, robot costumes and robots performed in a gallery
space aims to engage audiences with hybrid human-machine
entanglements in embodied and empathic ways.
Keywords
diffraction, dramaturgy, entanglement, human-robot inter-
action, hybridity, performance, posthuman.
Introduction
Hybridity is predicated upon difference—we can only rec-
ognize something as hybrid and symbiotic if we
acknowledge and recognize the potential of difference. This
paper seeks to bring to the fore the aesthetic and social po-
tential of difference in our relationships with machines. It
attempts to trouble practices in human-robot interaction that,
like many human practices, are invested in deliberately
masking difference, grounded in hierarchical and hege-
monic beliefs. Stuck in what Barad [1] referred to as the
“representationalist trap” of reflection, we look for and fab-
ricate resemblances between what are, essentially, deeply
asymmetric entities [2]. Many of our current human-robot
imaginaries thus echo or reaffirm the conservative narra-
tives that validate existing social norms. Yet how we imag-
ine social machines and the future narratives they are em-
bedded is not only a matter of appearance but literally mat-
ters—socially, politically, and ethically. Machines with hu-
manlike facades, for instance, are often presented as more
familiar and friendly; but they also serve to confine both
bodies and things in mimicry and servitude [3, 4, 5].
Our Machine Movement Lab (MML) project attempts to
counter this reflection-centered approach by developing a
diffractive practice, which foregrounds and aesthetically
exploits the differences between humans and machines.
MML thus seeks to trouble our relationships with robots that
manifest from reductive desires to render the machine as hu-
manlike as possible by investigating creative strategies for
reimagining and reconfiguring our relationships with them.
This paper focuses on our latest research stage, which
draws on Donna Haraway’s [6] and Karen Barad’s [1] new
materialist conception of diffraction to explore the potential
of performance-making and posthuman dramaturgy for en-
tangling humans and machines. With the latter we seek to
open up ontological boundaries, such as the one delineating
subjects and objects, and to reconfigure them or render them
porous, the bodily-material way. We believe that such re-
configurings challenge the limited, humancentric ways in
which we envision our robotic futures by expanding our
bodily ways of knowing and becoming more attentive to the
performative potential of this hybrid, more-than-human en-
counter.
We begin with providing a brief overview of the prac-
tices within which our work is situated, along with some key
artists whose work has influenced our practice. Following,
we introduce our MML project and how it harnesses the
generative potential of movement in tandem with dancers’
kinesthetic expertise to become-with and design abstract
machine artifacts. We then take a closer look at our perfor-
mance-making approach and posthuman dramaturgical
framing. Looking at the making of human-robot relation-
ships as a more-than-human entanglement, we outline the
feminist concepts that our new materialist practice draws on
and seeks to mobilize. Finally, we discuss the making of an
improvisational performance score, arising from our exper-
imental studio practice, and how it aims to facilitate the en-
gagement of audiences in embodied and empathic ways.
Situating our Practice
Looking at our relationships with robots from a performance
perspective highlights their embodied, socio-cultural, mate-
rial and, sometimes, co-dependent nature. We situate our
transdisciplinary practice across the practices of machine
performance, kinetic sculpture, and robotic art that experi-
ment with movement and its capacity to evoke affective re-
lationships between bodies and things. Artists have long de-
ployed performance concepts to create ‘living’ sculptures or
Camera-ready draft. Published in Proceedings of ISEA2023, Symbiosis, Paris, May 16 to 21, 2023.
machine performances that both critically and playfully ex-
plore intimate couplings between human and machine bod-
ies. Marco Donnarumma, for instance, seeks to highlight the
co-dependence of hybrid (human-machine) embodiments
rather than a “pairing of two different things” [7].
Jean Tinguely’s early kinetic sculptures induce a sense of
creative machine spirit [8], and Robert Breer’s slowly mov-
ing Floats used motorized wheels to gradually rearrange
themselves in space, and thus, almost unnoticeably, recon-
figure space [9]. More recently, The Table: Child-
hood (1984–2001) by Max Dean, Raffaello D'Andrea and
Matt Donovan produces surprising relational dynamics be-
tween audience members and the familiar object of a ta-
ble [10]. Kris Verdonck’s Dancer #3 [11] performs the en-
ergetic clumsiness of an optimistic clown in empathically
accessible yet distinctly machinic ways.
State Grace Machines by Bill Vorn, Emma Howes and
Jonathan Villeneuve explores questions of kinaesthesis and
perception in a dialogue between abstract machine perform-
ers and a dancer [12]. Eve of Dust, a collaboration between
John McCormick, Adam Nash and Stephanie Hutchison, in-
vestigates possibilities of physical collaboration and cocre-
ation between a human dancer and a robot arm [13]. Louis-
Philippe Demers’ performance work The Tiller Girls fore-
grounds the whimsey and vulnerability of machine bod-
ies [14]; in line with Paula Gaetano Adi’s poetic embodied
entanglements, such has produced by her works Becom-
ingWith and Alexitimia [15], promoting the social presence
of machines and strange affective capacity of abstract ma-
chines.
All these works generate their own dramaturgical frame
for exploring the social capacity of non-humanlike ma-
chines and complicating our relationships with them; thus,
expanding our understanding of how we relate to machines.
Machine Movement Lab (in a nutshell)
Our Machine Movement Lab (MML) project is a collabora-
tion with dancers, choreographers, AI researchers, engi-
neers, and numerous materials (from cardboard, PVC tubes,
plywood to aluminum framing, motors, motor controllers,
cables, cable binders, and software programs), across robot-
ics labs, dance studios, fab labs, and gallery spaces over the
past seven years. MML harnesses the generative potential of
movement and its dynamic qualities to explore the aesthetics
of entangling and empathy in human-robot encounters [14,
3]. Rather than human- or animal-like, our robots are ab-
stract, machinelike artefacts, forged from a practice of be-
coming entangled with the machine morphology and its
unique, more-than-human capacities. Our latest research
stage is concerned with performance-based inquiries into
posthuman, transcorporeal reconfigurings and their poten-
tial to expand our possible relationships with abstract, ma-
chinelike robots.
Movement as a generative, relational force MML regards
movement as a phenomenon or force, capable to make bod-
ies, meanings, and relationships. This contrasts much of the
current robotics research where movement is understood as
a means of navigation or imbuing an object with a pre-de-
fined personality. The difference between looking at move-
ment as a productive force rather than an instrument is sig-
nificant because it allows us to become-with what it gener-
ates—its enacted relations, specific to this situation, rather
than using it to generate what we already know. This notion
of movement mattering, bodying-forth [16] and relation-
making, opens-up seemingly limitless opportunities for en-
tangling with more-than-human artefacts [3].
Relational-Body-Mapping (RBM) Our MML practice re-
volves around the idea that the kinds of relation-making that
movement propels happen in the dynamics of encounter and
unfold through “spatial, temporal, and energic quali-
ties” [17]. This is where meanings and affects get made and
distributed across human and nonhuman bodies, rather than
being pre-defined and pre-formed by certain beliefs about
what this more-than-human relationship should be.
Our diffractive approach aims to harness movement’s
generative force by enacting situations of close, corporeal
encounter that can open-up kinaesthetic experiences of be-
coming-with the machine artefact and its unique material
qualities. In practice, this involves getting entangled with
material props, whose material qualities can offer us a cor-
poreal glimpse of the machine’s more-than-human rela-
tional possibilities. To enable this becoming-with (i.e., en-
tangling), we ask dance performers to extend themselves
into, inhabit, or wrap around a wearable costume whose
shape and size resembles that of the robot (see Figures 1
and 2). The costume thus stands in for a becoming-robot de-
sign, at the early stages of the design process, and enables
dancers to feel into the robot’s material-spatial potential [3]
as well as the robot’s sensorium (equipped with the becom-
ing-robot’s sensors).
This more-than-human entanglement, which we will refer
to as performer-costume in the following sections, allows us
to experiment with and corporeally probe into a range of hu-
man-machine configurings. Our Relational-Body-Mapping
Figure 1. Relational Body-Mapping; with the cube performer,
A. Frahn-Starkie and S. McKenna, 2022. © P. Gemeinboeck.
(RBM) approach builds on our Performative-Body-Map-
ping (PBM) method, which focused on single performer-
cube entanglements and movement creation [18]. RBM ex-
pands PBM to seek more complex, nested entanglings and
the transcorporeal resonances they can effect, e.g., a (hu-
man) performer with a (robotic) cube performer; a per-
former-costume with a cube performer; or a (human) per-
former with a performer-costume and a cube performer (see
Figure 1), and so on.
Cube Performer The robot costume not only allows the
dancers to ‘feel into’ the differences of the machinic embod-
iment but also to capture the kinetic dynamics that unfold in
this more-than-human entanglement. The hybrid motion
data, arising from this human-nonhuman enmeshment, in-
forms the robot’s machine learning process, where the ma-
chine learns to improvise movements based on its own me-
chanical embodiment and the patterns it derives from our
entangled motion data [14].
Our first robot prototype––the cube performer (see Fig-
ure 2)—resulted from a series of corporeal entanglements
with a wide range of materials. It is a simple box-shaped
artefact, which is transformed by its dynamic movements:
suddenly tilting up along one of its edges and gently sway-
ing or thumping onto the ground, the box quickly loses its
rootedness and becomes more-than-object [14]. The robots’
mechanical design was derived from an extensive analysis
of motion capture recordings of the performer-costume and
the relational motion patterns it produces [19]. Instead of re-
lying on googly eyes or pre-packaged personality, the robot
cube becomes a performer based on the enactive potential of
its movement dynamics [see 20, 17] and how they can co-
shape a meaningful encounter.
A more detailed discussion of our performance-based,
embodied robot design stage can be found in [3,14,18,19].
Diffractive Performance-Making
Our diffractive performance-making practice investigates
how corporeal entanglements with machine artefacts and
their different material-spatial and affective qualities can
open-up modes of transcorporeal empathy. The latter, we
believe, is key to meaning making with social machines
without relying on fake emotional facades (i.e., a humanlike
face).
Robotics practices, in general, often look at humans and
machines as two separate, already given or pre-defined en-
tities (i.e., subject and object). MML, in contrast, attends to
how subjects and objects are mutually constituted [2] by in-
vestigating the making of subject-object boundaries as a
nested entanglement. Meaning making here is about care-
fully attending to the possibilities for relations and meanings
to emerge.
According to Jon Lee, the alternative landscape of a dif-
fractive dramaturgy is experimental and experiential,
“where we feel for and towards (in a tentacular way) a col-
laborative making process that tilts the optic away from tra-
ditional expectations” [22]. Our diffractive, posthuman
dramaturgy generates an experimental and experiential
space, where we feel for possible entanglings, tentacular ca-
pacities and hybrid configurings of human performers and
nonhuman artefacts. It involves carefully probing into how
they matter, couple, interfere, and “undo and redo each
other” [23], and how this difference-in-relation gives rise to
transcorporeal meaning-making.
The following outlines some of the core theoretical con-
cepts that our performance-making practice draws on, and
then discusses some of the most significant interference pat-
terns whose emergence we have witnessed thus far.
Diffracting Subjects and Objects
Our posthuman dramaturgical approach attends to and aes-
thetically puts to work difference-in-relation (i.e., humans
and machines entangled) by seeking to materially mobilize
Haraway’s [6] and Barad’s [1] concept of diffraction. In
contrast to reflection (i.e., rendering machines humanlike),
diffraction maps interferences [14] and as such “attends to
the relational nature of difference” [24].
A diffractive practice embraces and foregrounds differ-
ences by attending to the specificity and materiality of en-
tanglements [1]. Diffraction thus not only serves as a figura-
tive lens but can shape a material process, i.e., in our practice
the dramaturgical/choreographic methods of interfering, su-
perposing and entangling bodies and things.
From a posthuman perspective, we always already are en-
tangled with the world and its ongoing reconfigurings [25,
1]. Barad’s notion of a posthumanist performativity calls
“into question the givenness of the differential categories of
‘human’ and ‘nonhuman’, examining the practices through
which these differential boundaries are stabilized and desta-
bilized.” [26]. Diffraction as both a tool and a practice can
make manifest the destabilization and stabilization of
boundaries [27].
In MML, we are particularly interested in the boundary-
making that both separates and defines subjects and objects.
How can we intermesh (given) subjects and objects, probe
into their boundaries and render them more porous or create
new hybrid entities? Rather than juxtaposing humans and
machines or making them appear to be the same, we seek
symbiotic possibilities based on difference patterns that ren-
der the boundaries between subjects and objects more elas-
tic. Diffraction and patterns of interference thus become a
methodological tool for “attending to and responding to the
Figure 2. Cube performer #1, robot prototype, at the Games as
Performing Arts Festival, AMATA, Falmouth University, UK,
2018. © P. Gemeinboeck.
effects of difference” [17:72]. The entanglement of bodies
and things maps their effects of difference similarly to
Barad’s description of superposition:
“… waves can overlap at the same point in space. When
this happens, their amplitudes combine to form a compo-
site wave form [and] the resultant wave is a sum of the
effects of each individual component wave; that is, it is a
combination of the disturbances created by each wave in-
dividually. This way of combining effects is called super-
position”. [28].
A posthuman dramaturgy for diffracting subjects and ob-
jects thus troubles engrained dichotomies and, instead,
traces the effects of differences that give rise to new forms
of more-than-human meaning-making—in MML, a trans-
corporeal form of meaning- and experience-making, which
we will look at in more detail below.
More-than-human Interference Patterns
Superposing human bodies and cubic things, in practice, re-
quires ongoing attunement to the becoming of bodies and,
with it, emerging agencies and differing identities—a mov-
ing with and continuous gesturing toward the more-than-hu-
man space of a ‘thing’—the process of becoming-thing. The
empathic resonances brought about by this superposition
can be described as a bodying-thinging [6]. Transcorporeal
bodying-thinging is about how bodies and things resonate
whilst undoing and redoing each other; at once tracing how
subjects and objects constitute each other and at the same
time rendering their boundaries elastic [3]. It attests to the
inherent porosity, relationality and reconfigurability of bod-
ies and things, how they already always extend toward and
across each other.
The following explores three of the most significant in-
terference patterns that we have observed thus far and how
they mobilize transcorporeal resonances of bodying-thing-
ing. They come about based on different degrees of entan-
glement, the number of entangled bodies and things, and the
emergent effects of ongoing reconfigurings.
Pattern #1: Spatial Superposition, Becoming-with This
interference pattern manifests from the dancers corporeally
exploring their entangledness with the cube by bodily listen-
ing to its material characteristics and capabilities and the
cube responding (talking back) by producing different ma-
terial sensations (its weight, how it bends, where it resists,
etc.). Becoming-with (see [20]) the cube then involves danc-
ers reconfiguring their bodies as well as letting themselves
being shaped by these nonhuman qualities and to feel-think-
move-with the cube (see Figure 3). Sometimes the two
simply interfere, other times they are in-phase, become-
with, and are bodying-thinging with each other.
Pattern #2: Stretching the Boundary between Subject
and Object We found that dwelling on the edge (i.e., the
subject object boundary, which may also align with an edge
of the cube) and feeling into it, stretches and carefully
opens-up the boundary in-between subjects and objects. The
threshold of the boundary becomes a zone to linger, to ex-
tend into or be extended by, to become familiar, to mingle
with (see Figure 4). It is the most symbiotic cube-performer
interference pattern with regards to its resulting shape and
the entanglement’s tentacular capacity (see following sec-
tion), where body-thing can no longer be separated, nor is
one entirely folded into the other. Rather than a barrier, the
boundary becomes an access zone—a gateway to bodying-
thinging and exploring the symbiotic affordances of this hy-
brid performer-costume entity.
Pattern #3: Nested Entanglings, Becoming-tentacular
Performance-making involving more than one performer
and one costume produces a nesting of difference patterns
and, with it, the affects that flow across the open seams of
Figure 3. Becoming with the cube; with dancer A. Frahn-
Starkie, 2022. © P. Gemeinboeck.
Figure 4. Stretching the Subject–Object Boundary; with A.
Frahn-Starkie and F. Palmerson, 2022. © P. Gemeinboeck.
each pattern. The nested entanglings unfold in a continual
process of attachments and detachments, e.g., the dancers
attaching themselves to a corner of the costume, a corner of
the space, or to a corner of the other costume, even if only
for a glimpse, even with only the tip of the toe (see Fig-
ure 5); then detaching again—from the corners, one by one
or all at once, to reattach and align with an edge, or a plane,
or the other dancer’s gaze. These re-/alignments open-up
spaces to link/mesh/interweave with other boundary spaces,
stretching and extending the lines of the cube to reach into
or meet other lines, and performer-costumes become tentac-
ular and intermesh; bodying-thinging here also means to
grow tentacles. Haraway speaks of
“tentacular ones [and how they] make attachments and
detachments; they make cuts and knots; they make a dif-
ference; they weave paths and consequences but not de-
terminisms; they are both open and knotted in some ways
and not others” [29].
All three of these symbiotic difference patterns result in
movements and dynamic constellations that are irreversibly
hybrid: The dancer’s body is reconfigured by the costume,
and the movements captured with the costume reconfigures
the movements learned by the robot [6, 18]. And when per-
former-costume and cube performer (robotic artefact) entan-
gle and become tentacular, new motion patterns evolve—
movements that neither belong to the machine nor the per-
formers-in-costume.
In the following we explore how our improvisational
score builds on these interference patterns and unfolds them
as a series of experiential scenarios, each performance anew.
Scoring an Improvisational Performance
Dancing with the Nonhuman is a roughly 20-min perfor-
mance work, to be performed in gallery spaces rather than a
separate stage. Its underlying semi-structured, improvisa-
tional score seeks to open-up our diffractive process to the
diverse embodied perspectives of audiences by performing
human-nonhuman interference patterns and the transcorpo-
real attunement they produce–each iteration anew.
Arising from our experimental studio practice and ob-
served, emergent-diffractive patterns, the underlying impro-
visational score shapes different ‘lenses’ through which the
experiential scenarios of human-nonhuman entanglement
unfold. The following outlines the four lenses that propel
Dancing with the Nonhuman [SYD-2-2-1] and how they mo-
bilise differently hybrid and tentacular configurings.
In (1) ‘phantom’, we witness a series of movements
shaped by the dancers’ cubic entanglement but reperformed
without the cube costume. The performance thus opens with
a kind of puzzle as these movements clearly belong to a
realm that is both more-than-human and more-than-object.
In (2) ‘threshold’, dancers feel their way along the
boundaries of the cube costume, extend them, entangle with
them, and render them elastic; meanwhile the cube per-
former slowly glides along straight lines, occasionally be-
ginning to twitch out of the grid.
In (3) ‘con-current’, we witness the dance performers
fully inhabiting their cube costumes. The encounter between
cube performer and performers-in-cube appears seamless
and interferences express themselves along geometric lines.
In (4) ‘co-play’, the encounter becomes a playground,
and it gets a bit messy, bodies and things tumble. And so do
their boundaries.
Audiences and transcorporeal empathy At the time of
writing, we are yet to perform this work in public. Im-
portantly, audiences are not expected to decipher any of
these patterns or lenses. The aim is for them to engage with
these alternate, posthuman human-machine configurations
not only by looking but also by transcorporeally empathiz-
ing with them, based on their own corporeal experiences
with tentacular, more-than-human configurations.
As we strive to collapse the distance between subjects and
objects, we also seek to render the boundary between per-
formers and audiences more porous. To avoid the distancing
effect of a stage, Dancing with the Nonhuman is designed to
be performed in gallery spaces. The performance area is
only marked through a grid on the floor, which assists per-
formers to locate themselves; it also represents the cubic
grid that the cubes break loose from (see Figure 6).
To render the boundary more porous, the performance in-
cludes transitional intro and outro stages, in which the per-
formance site is gradually established and dissolved again.
In the intro, audiences are welcome to stay inside the marked
performance area and mingle with both human performers
and cube performers (costumes and robot), while they
slowly shuffle across the boundary and get settled inside the
grid space. At the end of stage 4, the boundary becomes soft
again and audiences are welcomed to interact with the per-
formers, both human and nonhuman. While this could be as
casual as sitting down and gently leaning against one of the
cubic artefacts, we are keen for audiences to bodily explore
the performers’ perspectives, both human and nonhuman,
and to get entangled themselves.
Figure 5. Nested entanglings; with dancers A. Frahn-Starkie
and F. Palmerson, 2022. © P. Gemeinboeck.
Summary/In-Parting
This paper introduced our collaborative, diffractive perfor-
mance-making practice, as part of our ongoing Machine
Movement Lab (MML) project, to promote unscripted,
playful encounters with strange, non-humanlike machines.
Our collaborative project centers around the generative po-
tential of movement to harness dancers’ kinesthetic exper-
tise for empathizing with abstract machine artifacts. This
performance-making practice and its posthuman dramatur-
gical frame materially mobilizes the theoretical concept of
diffraction and new materialist notions of agential enact-
ment [30]. The more-than-human entanglements that our
practice attends to produces the diffraction patterns for map-
ping out alternative human-machine relationships. This dif-
ference-in-relation also shapes the making of a semi-struc-
tured, improvisational performance score, aiming for audi-
ences to engage with these hybrid entanglings in embodied
and empathic ways.
Our diffractive, creative research seeks to open-up new
performative strategies for aesthetically attending to and
making tangible difference patterns and relational ontolo-
gies at work in human-robot encounters. We propose that
opening-up a more horizontal playground for dancing with
machines requires us to get entangled and resonate with ma-
chines, which, in turn, requires collapsing the distance be-
tween subjects and objects (rather than masking it). Collaps-
ing distances, the diffractive way, means to stretch and
open-up the boundary in-between subjects and objects, to
explore the space in-between, and grow tentacles into other
boundary spaces. Performance-making here is a mode of
generative-diffractive inquiry into the re-/enactment of sub-
ject-object boundaries as part of the dynamic exchanges un-
folding in human-robot encounters.
Concerned with the relationalities of embodied meaning-
making [14], our choreographic-dramaturgical strategies
explore the performative aesthetics of corporeally entan-
gling human bodies and machinelike things and the more-
than-human difference pattern this produces. The aesthetic
potential of this practice, we believe, results from combining
the asymmetries that differentiate human and machine par-
ticipants [2] and the physical-dramaturgical entanglements
that render them relational, producing seemingly dissonant
inter-bodily resonances. Rather than serving to make the
strange look more familiar, aesthetics here is about render-
ing difference more relational.
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank their collaborators: Roos
van Berkel (TU/e, NL), Maaike Bleeker (Utrecht, NL),
Katrina Brown (Falmouth, UK), Arabella Frahn-Starkie
(AU), Rochelle Haley (UNSW, AU), Lesley van Hoek
(NL), Stephanie Hutchinson (QUT, AU), Sarah Levinsky
(Falmouth, UK), Linda Luke (De Quincey Co., AU), Dillon
McEwan (AU), Siobhan McKenna (AU), Kirsten Packham
(AU), Felix Palmerson (AU), Marie-Claude Poulin (Applied
Arts Vienna, AT), Tess de Quincey (De Quincey Co., AU),
Audrey Rochette (CA), and Kim Vincs (SUT, AU).
This project has been partially supported by the Australian
Government through the Australian Research Council
(DP160104706 and FT190100567); the Austrian Science
Fund (FWF, AR545); and the EU Framework Programme
(FP7, 621403).
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[14] Petra Gemeinboeck, “The Aesthetics of Encounter: A Rela-
tional-Performative Design Approach to Human-Robot Interac-
tion,” Frontiers in Robotics and AI, Vol. 7 (2021), accessed Sep-
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[15] Paula Gaetano Adi, “BecomingWith” and “Alexitimia”, Artist
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[16] Erin Manning and Brian Massumi, Thought in the act: Pas-
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[17] Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, “From movement to dance,” Phe-
nom. Cogn. Sci. 11, 2012, 39–57, 49.
[18] Petra Gemeinboeck and Rob Saunders, “Moving beyond the
mirror: relational and performative meaning making in human–ro-
bot communication,” AI & Society 37 (Springer, 2022), 549–563.
[19] Rob Saunders and Petra Gemeinboeck, “Performative Body
Mapping for designing expressive robots,” Proceedings of the 9th
International Conference on Computational Creativity, Sala-
manca, Spain, June, 2018, 280–287.
[20] Ezequiel Di Paolo, Hanne De Jaegher, and Marieke
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and play,” in Enaction: Towards a New Paradigm for Cognitive
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(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010), 33-87.
[21] Donna J. Haraway, When Species Meet (Minneapolis, MN:
University of Minnesota Press, 2008).
[22] Jon Lee, “Diffractive Dramaturgy,” Performance Research
25, no. 5, (2020), 114-121.
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ties in Human–Animal Worlds,” Theory, Culture & Society, 30,
no. 8, 2013, 51–76, 61.
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[25] Stacy, Alaimo, “Thinking as the Stuff of the World,” O-Zone:
A Journal of Object-Oriented Studies 1, 2014, 13-21.
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man Interpellation,” Parallax 20, no. 3, 2014, 231-244.
[28] Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Phys-
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the Chthulucene (Duke University Press, 2016), 31.
[30] Karen Barad, “Posthumanist performativity: toward an under-
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Authors Biographies
Petra Gemeinboeck’s and Rob Saunders’ collaborative artistic re-
search practice seeks to expand and trouble our relations with ma-
chines by exploring questions of embodiment, agency, creativity,
and performativity. Petra is currently an Australian Research
Council Future Fellow and Associate Professor at the Centre for
Transformative Media Technologies (CTMT), Swinburne Univer-
sity, AU. She also leads the ‘Dancing with the Nonhuman’ FWF
research project at the University of Applied Arts Vienna, AT. Rob
is Associate Professor at the in the Leiden Institute of Advanced
Computer Science (LIACS), University of Leiden, NL. His re-
search focuses on computational models of creativity, using tech-
niques from machine learning and creative robotics. Their artworks
have been shown internationally, including the Ars Electronica
Festival (Linz, AT); Int. Triennial New Media Art at NAMOC
(Beijing, CN); GoMA (Brisbane, AU); OK Center for Contempo-
rary Art (Linz, AT); and FACT (Liverpool, UK).
