My Chatbot’s Body” is presented within the “Embrace Angels” interactive performance installation, consisting of a 9-meter catwalk, two semi-automated Franka robot arms, and a conversational robot.
Interactive performance installation by Karen Lancel and Hermen Maat
In collaboration with University Nottingham, Studio Vrij and VU Art Science Gallery.
Location: NU Building Ground Floor, Vrije Universiteit, De Boelelaan 1111, Amsterdam.
Opening event: Thursday 29 October 16.00-18.30 (Theater 1).
This event will feature a talk and panel discussion with the artists, followed by a meet-and-greet with the artists and scientists over drinks and snacks.
Exhibition dates: Exhibition 28-31 October 2026 (NU lobby). The artists are present.
Exhibition times: Oct 28 17.00-19.00; Oct 29- 31 15.00-19.00
Performance Installation: “Embrace Angels – My chatbot’s Body”.
“My Chatbot’s Body” is presented within the “Embrace Angels” interactive performance installation, consisting of a 9-meter catwalk, two semi-automated Franka robot arms, and a conversational robot.
Can humans and robots truly embrace each other? Who is responsible? What memories will we share? How do our bodies feel embracing robots? Embrace Angels questions how robots and AI – increasingly replacing humans – define what passes for ‘social’, both in our embodied intimacies and in hybrid war zones. As a counter-practice, it provokes new narratives and rituals for critical dialogue about intimate relations between humans, robots, and AI in coexistence. The act of embracing is staged as a poetic playground to reimagine shared memory and rhythm, vulnerability and agency, risk and trust, and reciprocity when bodily boundaries shift between self, others, and machines in symbiosis. In this unfamiliar poetic AI ritual, we are all embracing cyborg angels.
This ongoing research draws on media performance art, philosophy, ethics, creative AI, HRI, and psychoneuroscience to investigate a relational field of human and robot bodies. Central is the act of embracing, both as a shared choreography of bodily becoming and as a critical metaphor for living in more-than-human ecologies.