Tech and performance at the Edinburgh Festivals
Tech Life
BBC
4.4 • 221 Ratings
🗓️ 19 August 2025
⏱️ 27 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
A special from Edinburgh, where art and performance meet tech with spectacular results. Including a magician with robot assistants, an AI improv group and an electrifying dance act.
Every August, Edinburgh becomes the centre of the arts world, with half a million visitors and thousands of acts descending on the Scottish capital. Among these are performers using some pioneering tech, asking questions about the role of AI in our lives and even a choreographer stimulating his dancers’ muscles with electricity.
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Presenter and producer: Imran Rahman-Jones Editor: Monica Soriano
(Image: A man in a white shirt a grey waistcoat, on stage with a humanoid robot head. Credit: Getty Images)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to TechLife on the BBC World Service with me, Imran Roman Jones. |
| 0:06.9 | This week we're in Edinburgh, in Scotland, for a special episode, |
| 0:11.2 | because every August the whole city transforms, hosting a month-long set of festivals, |
| 0:16.6 | bringing in comedy, theatre, poetry and all kinds of other cultural performances. |
| 0:21.9 | In fact, it's the biggest arts event on the planet |
| 0:25.0 | and brings in an estimated half a million people every year from all over the world. |
| 0:30.1 | A little bit of us so. |
| 0:33.2 | We're unified, we'll move a little bit faster, a little bit quicker. |
| 0:39.0 | Now, the city was formally established just... It's beautiful. I will move one little bit faster, a little bit quicker. Seven, six, seven. |
| 0:43.5 | Now, the city was formally established just over 900 years ago. |
| 0:48.0 | I'm right in the centre on the Royal Mile, and street performers like this one, |
| 0:55.3 | are entertaining crowds on cobbled streets in front of centuries-old ornate churches, statues and old monuments. |
| 0:56.5 | You want to see some danger! |
| 1:03.9 | But Edinburgh is also home to some cutting-edge tech, including the National Robotarium, |
| 1:10.4 | the UK's Centre for Robotics Research. And it will soon have the country's largest supercomputer in a recently announced 750 million-pound deal. |
| 1:14.4 | That's around a billion US dollars. |
| 1:16.9 | The various festivals attract experts, innovators and experimentalists in tech too. |
| 1:22.4 | In today's tech life, we'll be speaking to some of them. |
| 1:29.2 | Hello, where you're from? |
| 1:31.2 | I don't want to say that I've sold my soul to the robot overloads, but... |
| 1:35.1 | It would have been completely impossible just two years ago. |
| 1:39.3 | What other art form can give you goosebumps? |
... |
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