Featuring:

• 2 artists
• 15 researchers from 3 institutions
• 2 robot arms
• 8 cameras
• 12 days
• and most importantly…190 embraces performed

The Embrace Angels team took the project to the Medialab at Cinekids festival in Amsterdam, Netherlands during October 2025. This is a film festival specifically for children, and the Medialab invites visitors to experience cutting edge technology experiences around artificial intelligence, virtual reality, and robotics.

Unlike the previous performance of the project at Nottingham Contemporary, where we were in a very managed space, Cinekids was an open environment where Embrace Angels was one of many exhibits. This presented new challenges around how the embraces would be managed and what embraces were suitable for this new environment (not to mention the safety aspect!). However, these challenges were all part of the learning experience in pursuit of teaching the arms how to embrace. A lot of data was collected, including video recordings of the robot arms states and reflections from the artists. This will now be processed for insights, however one early observation is that we were not only teaching the arms how to embrace, but we were teaching ourselves as well.