I will present my project Becoming BFFs: Developing Cinematic Autoethnography with a Robot Dog as part of the SICCA Fellowship Forum in Fall 2025.
“Becoming BFFs” explores intimacy, embodiment, and AI alignment in the evolving relationship between a human parent and their robot dog. Using LIDAR imaging, 360° video, and snapshots of internal AI model states, I have piloted a hybrid cinematic language that blends human and machine perception. The project extends traditions of cinéma vérité in an algorithmic register, asking what it means to see our selves through the perceptual and cognitive systems of machines. It turns those introspective technologies to describe an emerging human-robot relationship. This project is a collaboration with Jesse Fleming.
Our paper on Quantum Theater is live on the ACM Proceedings of SIGGRAPH 2025:
Quantum Theater takes quantum phenomena and re-imagines them as playable theater using generative AI to expand narrative possibilities in real-time. Working with archival materials and recent literature, it engages quantum science both as a subject and a means for creating playable experience, exploring the history and current development of the field. Phenomena like entanglement, superposition, coherence, and collapse are used as models for experiential and narrative effects manifest in theatrical performance. Through XR techniques multiple realities are layered on stage, branching and collapsing as the action develops over the course of the performance. Functional quantum modules shape this narrative logic in a post-AI exploration of liveness, variability, and improvisation. Quantum Theater explores simultaneous narratives in a space of competing realities, casting the audience as observer-participants actively cohering a story through their choices.
Robert Twomey, Ash Eliza Smith, Reid Brockmeier, and Samantha Bendix. 2025. “Quantum Theater: Extending Realities for Post-AI Liveness”. In Proceedings of the Special Interest Group on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques Conference Spatial Storytelling (SIGGRAPH Spatial Storytelling ’25). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 10, 1–3. https://doi.org/10.1145/3721244.3742446
Quantum Theater: Extending Reality for Post-AI Liveness
Quantum Theater takes quantum science as subject and method for playable theater. Phenomena like entanglement, superposition, coherence, and collapse shape the performance in a post-AI exploration of liveness, variability, and improvisation. Multiple realities are layered on stage, where the audience as observer-participant plays an active role in cohering singular narratives.
Join us for Live Action Robotic Role Play (LARRP) with Robots and Shape the Future of Multispecies Care at the Kiewit Luminarium in Omaha, Nebraska. July 17, 2025, 7-10pm.
We will have two robots on hand that guests can interact with, a robotic dog and robotic arm. Guests will be prompted to interact through different scenarios and play out our robotic futures. We will be gathering data, ideating on and embodying new ways of giving and receiving care in more-than-human futures. This is an extension of the Speculative Robotics Lab pop-up at UNL in 2025.
Ash Eliza Smith Robert Twomey Sam Bendix Reid Brockmeier
(A Speculative Devices x Cohab Labs Production) Another Emergent Narrative System
Interviewing a Visitor about their Vision for Co-Robotic Care
I’m piloting a new course on creative code for Fall 2025 in the Department of Visual Arts: VIS42 Intro to Creative Code. This will replace our existing Computer Science (CS) requirement for Interdisciplinary Computing and the Arts (ICAM) Majors.
Description This course provides students with a foundation in programming and computational thinking, and their application in creative projects. Topics covered may include generative graphics and sound, interactive media, and others. Students will gain practical skills through hands-on experience and experimentation, learning to integrate computing into artistic practices. No prior programming experience is required.
Installation View of Negotiated Differences in Stakes and Holders, 2020. M+ Pavilion, Hong Kong. Commissioned by M+. Photo: Ringo Cheung
As part of the Department of Visual Arts Guest Speaker Series I hosted Shirley Tse for a remote artist talk on Thursday May 8, 2025.
About Shirley Tse
Los Angeles-based artist Shirley Tse (b.1968) works in sculpture, installation, photography, and text. She deconstructs our world of synthetic objects that carry paradoxical meanings and constructs different models in which differences might come together. Various strategies of visualising heterogeneity are used: conflating different scales, fusing the organic with the industrial, crossing between the literal and the metaphorical, merging different narratives, and collapsing the subject and object relationship. Tse received a Master of Fine Arts from ArtCenter College of Design, Pasadena and Bachelor of Arts degree from the Chinese University of Hong Kong Department of Fine Arts. Tse represented Hong Kong at the 58th Venice Biennale. Her work is featured in many articles, catalogues, and publications including Akademie X: Lessons in Art + Life (2015) and Sculpture Today (2007). Tse received the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in 2009 and is on faculty at California Institute of the Arts since 2001 where she is Robert Fitzpatrick Chair in Art. Her work is exhibited at venues including: Pasadena Museum of California Art (2004/2017); Osage, Hong Kong (2010/2011); K11, Hong Kong (2009); Kettle’s Yard, University of Cambridge (2009); Museum of Modern Fine Art, Minsk (2006); Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University (2005); Para Site, Hong Kong (2000/2005); Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts (2003); Art Gallery of Ontario (2002); Bienal Ceará América, Fortaleza (2002); Biennale of Sydney (2002); Capp Street Project, San Francisco (2002); Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (2002); MoMA PS1 (2002); New Museum (2002); Palazzo dell’Arengo, Rimini (2002); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2001); TENT, Centrum Beeldende Kunst Rotterdam (2001); and Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth, New Zealand (2000).
It was a pleasure to host Mendi + Keith Obadike at UCSD this past week on the occasion of their show “The Skeuomorph” at the Gallery QI. Talk and panel discussion embedded below.
I served as a guest judge for the Triton XR hackathon held at the Design Innovation Building on March 1-2, 2025. Triton XR is the UCSD VR/AR/XR student organization I am faculty advisor for. The theme was Mindfulness, and I judged along with with Trish and Joe from Maveric Studio, Cassie Vietan from the Stanford Compassion Institute/Center for Mindfulness, Jessica D’Elena Tweed, and external guests from Unity.
I’ll be giving a talk and serving on a round-table discussion at the Sixth National Research Platform (6NRP) Workshop at the Qualcomm Institute, La Jolla, CA on Tuesday, January 28 – Thursday, January 30, 2025.
The Workshop will cover both the current state of NRP as well as its future direction and long-term viability and success. Several tutorials will be offered on Tuesday, January 28th that will help attendees learn how to access NRP’s distributed campus-owned compute cloud and allied resources. Find more information here: https://na.eventscloud.com/website/79913/home/
Ash Eliza Smith and I are leading a workshop and performance on January 23rd, 2025 to coincide with the launch of the Ken Burns Leonardo Da Vinci documentary. Our half day workshop with the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute will work through the fundamentals of co-creation with generative AI, producing an immersive theater production performed in the evening at the Sheldon Museum of Art. With key creative and technical contributions from Sam Bendix and Reid Brockmeier.
