Perfolab Bucharest

A week of performing arts and technology projects with students in interactive technologies, dance, digital humanities, and computer engineering degrees from Romania, Italy, and Spain, focused on embodiment, nature, and social connection.

Date

12th to 16th October 2026

Main theme

PerfoLab on Embodiment as a Path to Connection (Mental Health, Nature Interaction, Social Inclusion)

Entry points

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• • Mental health and digital media: cyberbullying and disembodied vulnerability

    • • • Social interactions are quintessential for human wellbeing, yet digital media interactions occupy more and more of our lives, sometimes affecting our mental health and wellbeing. The core concepts of this challenge are vulnerability, visibility, embodiment, care, interconnectedness, social interactions, and risk-taking. Vulnerability — is a relational condition shaped by individual circumstances, peer relationships, and technological environments. During adolescence, sensitivity to social approval and exclusion can make online interactions particularly consequential for mental health, especially in the context of the higher risk-taking behaviours associated with adolescence. Visibility — invisibility is often associated with mental health. In the context of cyberbullying, it can start with seeking recognition and participation and can lead to unwanted exposure and public humiliation. While individuals can become highly visible in digital media, their distress can remain unseen. Embodiment — digital media abruptly transformed the way we interact. Heavy exposure to digital media can be associated with depersonalisation, bodily experiences of anxiety, disrupted sleep, and withdrawal into non-embodied interactions mediated through text, images, and avatars. Although digital interactions lack physical co-presence, their consequences become embodied. Care — from education and prevention to moderation, peer support, and professional intervention, digital assistance can connect with supportive relationships and environments and provide solutions for improving mental health in large populations.
        • Case Study:
          Cyberbullying among adolescents illustrates these interdependencies and solutions. WHO/Europe’s 2024 report found that approximately one in six adolescents across the surveyed countries and regions experienced cyberbullying. Research associates victimisation with depression, anxiety, and lower self-esteem. Consider an adolescent whose manipulated image circulates through a school messaging group, accompanied by derogatory comments and exclusion. Their representation becomes an object of collective attention, while their lived experience remains overlooked. Harassment extends into the home through persistent messages and notifications, potentially disrupting sleep, generating bodily tension, and undermining school participation. In applying our T-NET theatre improvisational method, developed to contribute to better social interactions in the classroom, mobile phone use was the primary disruptive behaviour, sometimes preventing teenagers from interacting in person and even triggering avoidance behaviours. How can interactive technologies and digital environments be harnessed to contribute to in-person social interactions without diminishing them? Interactive technologies could support digital literacy, bystander education, confidential reporting, and access to support. Non-embodied experiences, including anonymous text interfaces or avatars, may facilitate disclosure; embodied experiences involving voice, movement, or shared physical spaces may support emotional expression and rebuild trust. AI-assisted moderation could prioritise concerning interactions for human review, while specialist conversational interventions require evaluation of their benefits and limitations. How can interactive technologies connect these experiences, preserve adolescents’ agency, and transform cyberbullying into a shared responsibility of platforms, schools, and communities? How can they create pathways from digital exposure to embodied safety, care, and belonging, while distinguishing increased engagement or faster responses from demonstrated improvements in mental health?
        • References:
          • Li, H., Zhang, R., Lee, Y.-C., Kraut, R. E., & Mohr, D. C. (2023). Systematic review and meta-analysis of AI-based conversational agents for promoting mental health and well-being. npj Digital Medicine, 6, Article 236.
          • Orben, A., Meier, A., Dalgleish, T., & Blakemore, S.-J. (2024). Mechanisms linking social media use to adolescent mental health vulnerability. Nature Reviews Psychology, 3, 407–423.
          • Riehm, K. E., Feder, K. A., Tormohlen, K. N., Crum, R. M., Young, A. S., Green, K. M., Pacek, L. R., La Flair, L. N., & Mojtabai, R. (2019). Associations between time spent using social media and internalizing and externalizing problems among US youth. JAMA Psychiatry, 76(12), 1266–1273.
          • World Health Organization Regional Office for Europe. (2024, March 27). One in six school-aged children experiences cyberbullying, finds new WHO/Europe study.
        • 
          Alexandru I. Berceanu
          is an Associate Professor in the Department of Animation and Interactive Media at the National University of Theatre and Film "I.L. Caragiale" in Bucharest, Romania, where he also teaches in the Master's programme in Community and Therapeutic Theatre. He initiated the International Center for Research and Education in Innovative and Creative Technologies (CINETic). His research focuses on emotion regulation, memory, aggressive and prosocial behaviour, bridging neuroscience, theatre, play, immersive environments, and gamified approaches. His research has been published in international journals, and his artistic practice spans interactive installations, virtual reality, immersive environments, animation and theatre. He developed T-NET, an improvisational theatre approach designed to develop emotion regulation skills in adolescents who have experienced adverse life events.
  • Harnessing nature through technology

    • 1. Bacteria are rapidly mutating to survive modern antibiotics faster than pharmaceutical science can engineer new ones. How can we use non-pathogenic bacterial growth or genetic simulation algorithms to make the invisible spread of resistance tangible in textiles, art, or computational media? Link
    • 2. Rising atmospheric carbon is turning oceans acidic, while ancient organisms (Archaea) thrive in extreme, toxic hydrothermal environments that mimic both early Earth and potential climate-collapsed futures. How can we design speculative robotic "creatures," generative code, or neural networks modeled on the survival mechanisms of extremophiles under toxic conditions? Link
    • 3. Global data production is exceeding the physical limits of silicon microchips, driving research into storing digital files inside synthetic DNA sequences (A,T,C,G). How can we translate human language, images, or digital software into base-pair sequences or build algorithms that simulate synthetic genetic selection and mutation? Link1 Link2
    • 4. Traditional silicon chips require toxic rare-earth metal extraction and produce massive e-waste, whereas biological mycelium networks naturally process signals and adapt to their environment. How can we interface microcontrollers directly with fungal electrical impedance to generate bio-synthesizer audio, or use mycelium growth as physical computing inputs? Link
    • Examples of artworks combining tech and nature science
  • The social inclusion of vulnerable groups from remote areas and of migrants

    The core concepts of this challenge are inclusion, vulnerability, remotedness and the way they interconnect. Inclusion - as social inclusion, but also generically as being a part of a whole, be it an imaginary, psychological, corporeal, societal, cultural or a political body. Remotedness - from conceptual remotedness to its physical manifestation as spatial, cultural and social exclusion Vulnerability - from embodied vulnerability to being rendered invisible and inexistent To exemplify how these concepts interconnect in practice I present here one case study, based on which we could develop a second one related to migrants.

    Case Study 1:

    Roma bodies as victims of floods and toxic waste in Rosia Montana being relegated to the invisible margins of an otherwise internationally visible community due to its successful struggle against a corporate mining project. The Roma from Rosia Montana have not been included in the mining project, neither in the internationally recognized environmental movement against the mining project, nor in the alternative development projects, or in the UNESCO heritage area of the locality. They have been treated as if they have not existed, although they constitute a highly dense neighbourhood of about 800 souls, yet unintegrated either as bodies equally deserving protection from environmental disasters and social integration, but even ignored conceptually. The premise is that hidden, invisible areas of vulnerable content render the vulnerable invisible, but not less real. The challenge is how to make this vulnerability visible and how to integrate it into an embodied whole of what is the current post-ming space of Rosia Montana. If we think of the locality as a body, or as a puzzle, the Roma neighbourhood is a missing piece of the whole, yet treated as if the locality has always been without it, an unfinished puzzle that forgot its missing piece. The challenge is that of remembering the whole, or imagining what the whole could be, to render back into existence the repressed content of the social body (i.e. the excluded vulnerable community) through digital and embodied practices. How could digitalisation help make this community visible as an equally deserving part of Rosia Montana, first perhaps conceptually, as an imaginary construct, and how could one then blow life into it through embodied cultural and political practices of inclusion?

    Resources:

    • Romania’s Glittering Secret: Gold & Quartz of Rosia Montana. - YouTube
    • Memories of Red: Gold Mining in Romania's Rosia Montana - YouTube
    • Rusu, O., F. Alexandrescu, I. Bunescu, I. Codreanu, C. Gheorghe, and I. Velicu. 2026. “Insidious Whiteness in Eastern Europe: Environmental Injustice and Dehumanisation in a Roma Community.” Antipode 58, no. 3: e70170.
    • Bunescu, Ioana, 2016. Roma in Europe. The Politics of Collective Identity Formation, Routledge NY.

    Case Study 2:

    Migrants often are an embodied paradox of movement across borders and spatial enclosure into remote camps or other forms of detention with no access to basic rights (as a minimum, access to information about their own rights i.e. about the asylum procedure). The spatial encampment, remoteness and separation from the daily life of the host societies are used as forms of deterrence of movement and integration. From the point of view of the host societies, the spatial encampment is a form of insulating against a perceived threat; from the point of view of the migrants, the spatial encampment is often the price to pay for their hope to pursue a safer and freer life by taking the risk to leave behind their war-wrecked or poverty-stricken countries and move across borders. The tension between these two ways of thinking and acting are mirrored into political decisions at European and state level, and directly affects the interaction (or lack thereof) between migrants and local citizens. How could digitalisation play a positive role to ease this tension and bridge the gap of mutual knowledge (getting to know the “stranger”), normalise the difference and similarity between these people and hence facilitate better integration? How could digitalisation play a role in creating an expanded field of knowledge and cultural production, where migrant and local knowledge and culture cross-fertilise?

    Resources:

    • Behrouz Boochani's literary prize acceptance speech – full transcript | Refugees | The Guardian
    • This Syrian artist paints world leaders as refugees. | Al Jazeera English | Facebook
    • Rusu, O., F. Alexandrescu, I. Bunescu, I. Codreanu, C. Gheorghe, and I. Velicu. 2026. “Insidious Whiteness in Eastern Europe: Environmental Injustice and Dehumanisation in a Roma Community.” Antipode 58, no. 3: e70170.
    • Burnard, P., Mackinlay, E., & Powell, K. (Eds.). (2016). The Routledge International Handbook of Intercultural Arts Research (1st ed.). Introduction and Overview (p. 1-9) Routledge, NY.

Challenges

This workshop invites students to explore embodiment as a path to connection, investigating how physical experience can mediate our relationships with technology, nature, society, and digital environments. Through movement, sound, performance, and 3D environments, the workshop examines the tensions and possibilities between the physical and the digital: how digitalisation affects perception, cognition, and mental well-being; how technology can deepen our relationship with natural and biological processes; and how embodied digital experiences can create new forms of cultural participation and social inclusion for people in remote or underserved communities, including migrants.

The workshop approaches the body as a source of knowledge, expression, and connection. Students will investigate movement as data, sound as a spatial and embodied experience, and digital environments as spaces for interaction and collective participation.

Participants will learn to capture, interpret, sonify and visualise movement, while also exploring how these processes can become material for performance, installation, scenography, and interactive environments.

Students will work in mixed interdisciplinary teams, integrating backgrounds in the arts, humanities and technology, and bringing together participants from the three partner universities. Each team will present a creative research prototype, in the form of technology-based performances, interactive installations, live-coded environments, or site-specific/public-space interventions. The projects will emphasise collaboration across disciplines: technical students participate as performers and co-creators, while students from the arts contribute to the conception and development of technological solutions.

The intended outcome is therefore twofold: an artistic performance enabled by technology, and a technological/engineering solution shaped by artistic practice.

GUESTS

Alexandra Ciocan, biologist, Institute of Biology Bucharest

Anna Dumitriu, bioartist ‪

Schedule

Day 1 (12th October - Monday)

Day 2 (13th October – Tuesday)

Day 3 (14th October – Wednesday)

Day 4 (15th October - Thursday)

Day 5 (16th October - Friday)

HOW TO GET TO INSTITUTE OF BIOLOGY (Monday 9.30)

Address: Splaiul Independenței 296, 060031 București

From and to CINETic / city centre: trolleybus 90

How to get to CINETic (Tue-Fri 9.30)

Address: Strada Tudor Arghezi 3b, 030167 București

Near Universitate> metro station, in city centre, behind TNB theatre.

RESOURCES

• • • • • • 1. Performance Artists
            2. MoCap
            3. Multimodal Systems
            4. PyEyesWebTD
            5. MotionScript
            6. Movement Sonification
            7. Immersive Technologies
            8. LiveCoding
            9. Interactivity in Virtual Reality with 3.js-WebXR
            10. Mental health and digital media: cyberbullying and disembodied vulnerability
            11. The social inclusion of vulnerable groups from remote areas and of migrants
            12. Anna Dumitriu (Bio artist and workshop host) 
            13. Handbook of intercultural art research
            14. Environmental Injustice and Dehumanisation in a Roma Community
            15. Perfolab Intro Rules
            16. Project Results 
            17. Ideation Canvas
            18. Satisfaction questionnaire