Highlight Festival 2026

Session ‘Robotic Otherness’

What if robots are not almost-human, but fundamentally other? Science fiction and robotics alike have long been shaped by the assumption that robots should resemble humans as closely as possible in appearance, communication, and behaviour. But this assumption may limit our understanding. In this session, Maaike Bleeker, Professor in Theatre Studies (Utrecht University) and Project leader Dramaturgy for Devices and theatre maker Ulrike Quade invited the participants to consider robots not as imperfect copies of ourselves, but as a radically different kind of being. By approaching robots as a strange species or even as alien life forms, they explored how robotic otherness reshapes our expectations, perceptions, and modes of interaction. Through artistic and theoretical perspectives, this session opened up new ways of relating to machines on their own terms.

This is an abridged re-publication of an original blogpost written by Judith Fraune on the D4D website.