Kilowatt Festival 2026

During our presentation, we introduced our research on grieftech, speaking about our 2026 theatre performance Roman & ELIZA and our work with the 3D Universum ‘Deep Therapy’ tool. Both cases serve to highlight how performance research is an important lens to consider artificial sociality and our relationship to the tools that produce it.

When avatars and chatbots are designed to ‘role play’ as close personal relations, this raises many questions concerning our perception of (a)liveness. We propose that the practices of dramaturgy, puppetry and scenography can become ways to understand these emotionally fraught contexts of human-machine interaction.

We are extremely grateful to the festival directors Lucia Franchi and Luca Ricci as well as Bas Ernst from the Dutch Embassy in Rome and Anja Krans from Fonds Podiumkunsten who made this collaboration possible.