COLLABORATION

Through a five-day workshop, the artist challenged the students to step out of their engineering bubble and think from the position of the robots they design. Together, they sketched prototypes for robotic performers whose characters and backstories synthesised our conflicting notions about the robotic field. Among them, we could find a lonely trash collector robot looking for connection and a hoard of pink chihuahuas going on strike.

With her practice, Rocio Berenguer aimed to bring the students beyond the strictly utilitarian and emotionally limited creatures where robots are confined. Instead, she sees the inhabitants of this realm as capable of creating meaning and being subject to their rights. To tease out this possibility, she tested out the scenographic set-up of a debate in which each of the robot characters dreamed up by the students could argue for their rights based on the different personalities that the students carved for them during the week. At the end of the week, the robot with the most performative character will be part of the theatre piece OTREDADES planned for 2026. 

OTREDADES

In this performance, Rocio Berenguer explores relationships with otherness through fiction, chatbots and robots. On stage, she invites the audience to travel through the history of divinatory arts and predictive technologies by summoning Artificial Intelligence, weather predictions, oracles, misunderstandings and radical otherness with poetry and humour. The performance centres on a monologue and a multitude of robots, mechatronic animals and chatbots who share the stage with the author.

Profile

Rocio Berenguer

Rocio Berenguer is an author and artistic director. She creates speculative narratives that challenge our imagination of the future by focusing mainly on the themes of technology and ecology. For each new work, Rocio Berenguer works with researchers who generate a text combined with other materials, including theatre, dance, videos and digital art. Her creations mainly take the form of installations and interactive shows. Her work has been shown in national theatres in France and Spain, as well as festivals and venues in India, Ivory Coast, Emirates, Canada, Germany, Italy, Belgium, Switzerland, Finland, the Netherlands and Sweden. Since 2013, she has collaborated on several arts/science projects related to interactive devices, language models, robots and chatbots.