Audience members wearing physiological sensors during the posthuman performance. © 2024 Hiroyasu Daido, used with permission.
What happens when the line between a human performer and a machine blurs on stage? We are presenting this work at the Augmented Humans conference 2026 in Okinawa, and it is one of those projects that keeps surprising us.
The setup: an artist wears sensors and a robotic arm, turning their own body into a live audio-visual mixer. Their movements, their physiological signals, all of it feeds into the sound and visuals in real time. The performer becomes something in between – not quite human soloist, not quite machine, but a hybrid that makes you question who or what is actually creating the art.
We want to know what this does to the people watching. So we put PPG, EDA, and motion sensors on 23 audience members, hand out questionnaires, and sit down with them for interviews afterwards. The idea is to capture the full picture – what their bodies do during the show, and what they think and feel about it after.
Here is where it gets interesting. The physiological data tells one story: skin conductance goes up, heart rates shift, bodies move in sync with key moments on stage. People are clearly engaged on a physical level. But when we talk to them, many say they feel confused. They don’t quite know what they are watching or how to make sense of it. They are moved, but they struggle to say why.
That disconnect is the core finding, and honestly, we think it is the most exciting part. Your body can be deeply engaged with a performance even when your mind hasn’t caught up yet. You don’t need to “get it” intellectually to be affected. For anyone working at the intersection of art and technology, this is a good reminder that the body often understands things before the brain does.
Here is a video of the performance:
Citation
Kai Kunze, Mingyang Xu, Danyang Peng, Lucas Ogasawara de Oliveira, Rose Shao, Xiaru Meng, Matthias Hoppe, and Giulia Barbareschi. 2026. Embodied Responses to Posthuman Performance: A Mixed-Methods Study of Physiological and Emotional Audience Reactions. In The Augmented Humans International Conference 2026 (AHs 2026), March 16–19, 2026, Okinawa, Japan. ACM, 1–12. https://doi.org/10.1145/3795011.3795056