How can we connect with robots without mimicking human traits? Can we build meaningful relationships with nonhuman-like bodies? What if sociality emerges in the encounter itself? The Human-Robot Experience (HRX) Theatre tutorial introduces a participatory methodology for reimagining our relationships with robots through movement-based, experience-centered exploration. Participants will explore how we bodily resonate and make meaning with non-anthropomorphic machines using our Relational Body Mapping (RBM) method, employing robot costumes to facilitate embodied perspective-taking. Adopting a robot's unique perspective to experience its distinct social affordances expands our understanding beyond anthropocentric views, unlocking new modes of nonverbal communication and embodied empathy. Movement and its meaning-making potential are key to HRX. We begin with gentle movement explorations. This heightened sensitivity will shape our first embodied dialogues with artifacts. A live performance with dancers, costumes, and a robot will showcase how RBM harnesses kinesthetic awareness to explore how sociality arises in the encounter. Applying their embodied insights, participants will develop and enact inclusive speculative scenarios through embodied role-play with robot costumes. This tutorial introduces an embodied prototyping approach that leverages the potential of movement dynamics for designing expressive, nonhumanlike robots. Cultivating empathy with machinelike entities could promote the design of more diverse and sustainable relationships that recognize and leverage the differences between humans and robots. No prior dance experience is required; participants will engage at their own comfort level. Join us to explore the transformative potential of movement in reimagining our robotic futures! Supported by the Australian Government through the Australian Research Council (FT190100567).

This paper investigates how a non-humanlike, abstract robot can develop a social presence based on its capacity to move in delicate and dynamic ways. We outline our Performative Body Mapping (PBM) method for robot motion design and report on an audience study of our first robot prototype. These early results indicate support for our hypothesis that movement quality can imbue a robot with a distinct sense of affective agency, without the need for a humanlike or pet-like appearance. The paper embeds these accounts in an exploration of the connections between dance, motion design and knowledge translation along a trajectory of kinesthetic experience.

This paper focuses on curating interactive art in experimental ways. It takes the experiment outside labs and into institutions and cityscapes in the form of prototype exhibitions to be evaluated through the medium of audience engagement. The PhD research focuses on authenticating the audience's experience of interactive art; first defining parameters for authenticity within fine arts and creative robotics, then examining how, through the application of evaluative frameworks to iterative exhibition processes, one might capture and utilize experience as a medium in itself. The exhibitions for examination are/will be produced by PhD researcher Deborah Turnbull Tillman through her research initiative New Media Curation (NMC).

Technological artefacts can mediate the relations between humans and the environment: mediation changes our agency, which can be defined as our capacity for action. There can be different types of technological mediation and each type shapes our agency differently. Our model of wearable environments, which combines wearable computing and smart environment approaches, is useful for exploring new types of relations and, by extension, new forms of agency. In this paper, we present the first stage of developing a wearable environment system involving a series of workshops using two prototype devices. We evaluated the workshop activities according to a post-phenomenological account: this has allowed us to analyse the transformation of machine-mediated agency vis-à-vis two dimensions: perception and praxis. Our findings showed that interpretations of sonic and tactile feedback were highly dependent upon the placement of the sensing and effecting capacities of the system.

The paper discusses the digital artwork series Impossible Geographies, works that weave dynamic cartographies of invisible, fragile and hybrid spaces. Impossible Geographies 01: Memory invokes the memory space of a gallery, producing cracks through which past events seep into the physical present. Net_Dérive negotiates the space between a gallery and its urban neighborhood, creating hybrid narratives along the grooves left by participants equipped with mobile phones. The playground of Impossible Geographies 02: Urban Fiction spreads across the city and beyond, mixing and shifting multiple urban geographies as participants sweep along the urban fabric with advanced mobile phones. The conceptual and technological methods of 'lens-making' and 'spacing,' developed in these artworks, explore the subjective, hybrid, and migrational nature of the geographies we belonging to. By re-sculpting the fluid nature of the urban fabric the works transform the everyday urbanscape into impossible imaginary geographies.

This paper looks at the conditions and the constitution of the boundary between participants and virtual environments. Based on two of the author's immersive, interactive scenarios, this boundary is regarded as a transformative extension of the participants' body. As the CAVE® environment Uzume is bodily explored through moving and gesturing, participants continuously affect the current environment's state and behaviour. The tele-immersive installation Ma?a--Veil of Illusion connects two remote sites, creating a dynamically evolving virtual passage in-between. Here the design of interfacing the human participant and the virtual surrounding is inseparably interwoven with the evolutionary behaviours of the environments themselves. It challenges the Cartesian notion of the body as a passive receptor and addresses its constituting role of the relationship between the participant's embodied self and its computated representation. Considering this boundary as dynamic and permeable, enables a mutual relationship that is able to unfold beyond the author's predefined responses and interpretations.

The paper discusses the boundary between virtual and physical spaces as it is constituted and perforated in a series of installation works by the author. It focuses on the recently completed interactive installation, Impossible Geographies 01: Memory, in which the memory of a space becomes the metaphoric articulation of a virtual seepage into the physical present. Impossible Geographies 02: Urban Fiction, currently being developed, will expand the underlying idea of computated negotiations of geographies and will embed these evolving dialogues in the urban fabric. The series aims to move the contact surface of the virtual further into the physical and to investigate issues of belonging and unbelonging to a space that is naturally inhabited by the participants.

Impossible Geographies 01: Memory is an interactive installation in which memory becomes the metaphor for the fluid boundaries between the physical and the virtual. It dynamically traces visitor's actions and mixes them in unexpected ways with memories captured by the physical space. Throughout the exhibition, those memories of visitors and actions seep into the present environment, creating a virtually woven fabric of events that grows and evolves over time. This paper discusses the experience of (temporarily) inhabiting a space that senses, captures and remembers.