Thinking the Indeterminate Futures

The Futures Lecure Series is organized by the master’s degree programmes in Choreography, Dramaturgy, and the Live Art and Performance Studies in collaboration with the Centre for Joint Studies at Uniarts Helsinki’s Theatre Academy.  Jaana Parviainen’s lecture on AI-driven social robots  is the third one in the Futures Series. The series proposes that we need to regard the future as plural futures.

Drawing on phenomenological discussions on embodiment, Jaana Parviainen seeks to answer the question of how the interactive capabilities of robot bodies, in particular their materiality and animate movements, appeal emotionally to human users. Using as an illustrative empirical case a field study on the robot Zora in municipal sheltered homes in Finland, she suggests that the simulation of a “lived body” can be seen as central in understanding the phenomenon of aliveness in social robots. More information on the event are available on the website of Uniarts Helsinki’s Theatre Academy