Fostering Intimacy with Intelligent Machines

November 6th, 2025 (link)

This performance-lecture (with a robot dog) presents artist and engineer Robert Twomey’s artistic research into the ways we live with, think through, and feel alongside machines. From his dissertation “Machines for Living”—a study of the smart home as an intimate site of technological cohabitation—to recent work on “communing” with creative AI, Twomey explores how emerging technologies shape domestic, perceptual, and emotional life. Central to his practice is the design of introspective technologies: hybrid systems that act as mirrors, surrogates, and partners, producing mutually revelatory encounters between human and machine. Twomey introduces BFF, a new media artwork with Jesse Fleming, in which two artist-researchers co-parent and converse with quadruped robot dogs running local LLMs. Structured as a Batesonian metalogue, BFF stages recursive, embodied dialogue about AI alignment, simulation, and attachment, offering a poetic exploration of machine intimacy at the frontiers of art, AI, and the everyday.

Professor Twomey’s Athenaeum presentation is the keynote for Third Annual Meeting of the World Imagination Network.