Robotic Relations
Highlight Symposium

How will we live together with robots?

Thursday 12 February 2026, Theater De Veste, Delft

Robots are no longer confined to factories or laboratories. They move among us, listen to us, learn from us, and increasingly shape how we live, work, and create. But what does it really mean to live together with robots?

At the Highlight Symposium ‘Robotic Relations’, you are invited to explore this question alongside researchers, artists, designers, and makers. Rather than focusing on technology itself, the symposium places the spotlight on our relationship with machines: how we perceive them, how they affect our behaviour, and how they challenge our ideas about creativity, agency, and presence.

Hosted at Theater De Veste during Highlight Festival, the symposium brings together leading researchers Maaike Bleeker, Serdar Așut, David Abbink, and Marco Rozendaal with festival artists and creators. Through talks, panels, and interactive installations, they explore whether robots can become extensions of human creativity, how we might understand robots as more-than-tools, and what happens when we encounter them in shared physical space.

Programme – Thursday 12 February 2026

12:15–12:30 Doors open

12:30–17:00 Symposium with sessions 'Robotic Otherness', 'Shared Spaces' and 'Creative Collaborations'

17:00 Drinks

17:30 Highlight Festival visit!

Tickets

The symposium ticket is available as an add-on to your Day Ticket or Full Festival Ticket. After the symposium, you can head straight into the city of Delft to experience installations at the intersection of art, science and technology.

Sessions

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 (researcher, Utrecht University) and theatre maker Ulrike Quade invite us 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 explore how robotic otherness reshapes our expectations, perceptions, and modes of interaction. Through artistic and theoretical perspectives, this session opens up new ways of relating to machines on their own terms.

Shared Spaces

How do humans and robots coexist in physical environments? Sharing space with moving, sensing machines raises questions about safety, trust, agency, and bodily awareness. In this interactive session, installations by Animaspace (Angelina Kozhevnikova) and Hrvoje Hirsl allow participants to physically experience what it means to navigate space together with robotic systems.

In dialogue with scientists Marco Rozendaal and David Abbink, the session explores how robotic technologies shape spatial relations and human behaviour. When do these relationships feel intuitive or desirable, and when do they become uncomfortable or problematic? Art and science come together in a performative setting that invites participants to engage, reflect, and ask questions about how we might co-create shared spaces with robots.

Creative Collaborations

What happens when we create with robots in the physical world? Are robots merely tools, or can they become creative partners? In this panel, Serdar Așut explores with Amir Bastan, Jorrit Paaijmans and Aga Blonska ideas, methods, and emerging technologies that enable collaboration between humans and intelligent machines. The session reflects on how creativity is shared and transformed in human–robot partnerships, examines the opportunities and limitations of working with robots, and discusses what might come next.

By opening up this conversation, the panel invites the audience to reflect on the future of creativity, authorship, and agency in hybrid human–machine environments.