The Uitmarkt in Amsterdam is the national opening of the cultural season, click here for more information. Here art institutions, cultural organizations and performing arts and music companies present their programmes to the public. The Uitmarkt was organize for the 41st time and has been held at many different locations in the city. But now for the second time on the Marineterrein on the East side of the Central Station. Three organizations were invited by the BankGiro Lottery Fund to present their programmes to potential audiences. The best case projects were NDSN-Wharf with Ferrotopia by Atelier van Lieshout, BredaPhoto Festival with the theme To Infinity and Beyond, and ROBOT LOVE. Our tent was decorated with ROBOT LOVE material and a table full of robots from the Shelter for Abandoned Robots. This attracted the attention of young and old and brought many visitors to our tent.
Giep Hagoort at the Uitmarkt
Conversation piece was Mai Ching, the Chinese-speaking sex robot from
Mytenga Dolls, who was placed in a cage. Not really a friendly way of presenting Robot Love? But surely one that protected the delicate Mai Ching and at the same time stimulated the debate on robot rights. How far can we go with robots? Do they have anything to bring to the table with regard to the position in which we put them in? A discussion that was held amongst others by
Giep Hagoort, professor emeritus at the
Utrecht School of the Arts. Hagoort is organizing a
pilot process to address the legal position of robots. In a lawsuit, a brothel owner indicts a sex robot from her brothel. She wants to ban the publication of information about her brothel by the sex robot. The sex robot has distributed information on the internet about a violent client. The brothel owner fears increasing reputational damage. Previous attempts to hack the sex robot to limit the damage in this way did not work out. A ban by the judge is necessary in the eyes of the brothel owner.
On Thursday morning, October 4, 2018, the lawsuit will be held in a
symposium on robot rights during ROBOT LOVE at the Campina Melkfabriek in Eindhoven. Tickets will soon be available through this website.
