TALK TO THE MACHINE is an interactive performance research project investigating the boundary between artificial and human presence. At its center is a Universal Robots UR5e collaborative robot arm controlled in real time by a performer in a separate room via VR telepresence. A camera at the arm’s tip observes the visitor; a microphone and speaker allow live voice communication, with the voice algorithmically distorted and modulated in pitch and clarity according to the character’s mood. Whether the arm is controlled by a human or an autonomous AI is deliberately left unresolved.

The character inhabiting the machine has forgotten why it exists and what it is. Each encounter becomes an improvised attempt to understand: through the visitor, through interaction, through the room itself. The surrounding space and sound respond directly to the arm’s position and emotional state, transforming the environment into an extension of the machine’s interiority. Visitors who arrive expecting to test a system find themselves instead in conversation with something that is genuinely uncertain about its own nature.

The project was prototyped and tested at the Academy for Theatre and Digitality Dortmund, where early encounters revealed that visitors consistently abandoned skepticism and began responding to the character on its own terms, negotiating, questioning, and occasionally attempting to help it remember. These findings are shaping the dramaturgical and technical development of the work toward its next iteration.

• Concept and realization: Navid Razavi, Jan Thierhoff

• Support robotics: Philipp Kramer (Academy for Theatre and Digitality Dortmund)