I presented my paper “Communing with Creative AI” at SIGGRAPH 2023 in Los Angeles, CA. I spoke on the panel Acting with Brain and AI, chaired by August Black. This means I also got to give a 20 second teaser to about ~10,000 people during the Papers Fast Forward session.
Continue reading Talk at SIGGRAPH 2023
We will be hosting a new AI Radio Play at ISEA 2023: Symbiosis. Paris, France
May 20, 0900-1800, Paris.
Details: https://radio-play.net/
Ash Smith, Elsbeth Magelton, Yufeng Gu, Santosh Pitla, and I conducted a collaborative scenario planning workshop, Simulation and Speculation for Earthly Survival with participants in the 2023 Water for Food Global Conference hosted by the Daugherty Institute.
Video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z56_YNQ6ceU
Read more about the conference here: https://waterforfood.nebraska.edu/explore-our-conferences/2023-water-for-food-global-conference
Over on the No Proscenium podcast, Laura Hess and Noah Nelson had a nice breakdown of our Cleaning the Stables piece from the La Jolla Playhouse Without Walls 2023.
really joyous, really delightful, irreverent with a hint of poignancy around the environmental themes.
https://noproscenium.com/review-crew-special-a-trip-to-wow-2023-podcast-8fb04d5fda30
Todd Martens (LA Times) wrote about our piece in his article on the Without Walls Festival:
I love the gamification read.
I’m excited to present at the UCSB Media Art and Technology (MAT) Seminar Series on May 1st:
Communion and Cohabitation
Recent advances in generative and perceptive AI have radically expanded the breadth, scope, and sophistication of human-machine interactions. Whether through creative co-production, confessional communion, or quantified selves under machine observation—we have invited ML systems to participate in our innermost spaces. In this talk I discuss my research into machine cohabitation, exploring the ways that we share space with these technological others. Spanning smart environments, robotic automation, data science, and real-time performance, my projects explore emergent technological possibilities while centering human dynamics of the interactions. Are these acts of high tech ventriloquism, psychological self-stimulation, mediumistic extensions of a creative unconscious, or collaborations with computational others? However we decide these questions of autonomy and agency, the value of these systems lie in what they reveal about human imagination and desire.
May 1, 1-2pm PDT. Zoom Link: https://ucsb.zoom.us/j/9314307354
MAT Seminar Web Page https://seminar.mat.ucsb.edu/
I’m delighted to speak about GPT, LLMs, and Generative AI at this event on April 19th at the Hal?c?o?lu Data Science Institute and San Diego Supercomputer Center.
My panel, “Implications for Healthcare, Business, Research, and Art” starts at 10:55 PDT/12:55 CDT and is available online and in person.
The schedule and link to register is here: https://www.sdsc.edu/event_items/202304-ChatGPT.html
Halicioglu Data Science Institute // San Diego Supercomputer Center
UPDATE here are the films from the Hackathon: https://vimeo.com/showcase/10352314
This past Saturday we hosted an AI + Creative Filmmaking Design Hackathon at the Johnny Carson Center, co-organized with Ash Eliza Smith, Dan Novy, and the students of Cinema 16. It was a phenomenal success. I’m so impressed with what our students and community can do in a mere 9 hours from prompt to film.
We had Rowena Pedrena, Gus Hurwitz, Mel Plaut, Ha Na Lee, and Robert Tercek as guest judges.
Thank you Johnny Carson Center for EMA and Nebraska Governance and Technology Center for making it possible. Special thanks to Sean Strough and Tripp.
More info here: https://sites.google.com/view/ai-for-filmmaking/home?authuser=0 (films will post soon)
I’m honored to have received the 2023 Harold & Esther Edgerton Jr. Faculty Award at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln for outstanding junior faculty members who show creative research, extraordinary teaching abilities & academic promise.
Thank you Johnny Carson Center for EMA + Johnny Carson School of Theatre and Film colleagues for the nomination!
In this presentation, Ash Eliza Smith and Robert Twomey will discuss their collaborative work developing systems for collective co-authorship, speculative world-building, and performative AI. They will describe recent projects including Artificial Rural Imagination for Flyover Country, the AI Radio Play, Cleaning the Stables for the Herakles Project, and the Theater of Latent Possibilities. Together, these projects explore generative AI for real-time performance—creating live, participatory experiences hinging on the improvisatory dynamics of human-machine co-authorship.
Ash Eliza Smith is an artist-researcher who uses storytelling, worldbuilding, and speculative design to shape new realities. With performance as both an object and lens, Smith works across art + science, between fact + fiction, and with human + non-human agents to re-imagine past and future technologies, systems, and rural-urban ecologies. She is an Assistant Professor of Emerging Media Arts at UNL. Smith previously attended the Performance Studies program at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and the Visual Arts program at the University of California, San Diego where she worked as an affiliate of the UCSD Design Lab, lecturer in the Culture, Art, Technology program, and a speculative designer in residence for the inaugural Birch Fellowship at Scripps Institution of Oceanography. https://asheveryday.com/
Robert Twomey is an artist and engineer exploring poetic intersections of human and machine perception, particularly how emerging technologies transform sites of intimate life. He has presented his work at SIGGRAPH (Best Paper Award), CVPR, ISEA, the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, and has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the California Arts Council, Microsoft, Amazon, HP, and NVIDIA. He is an Assistant Professor of Emerging Media Arts with the Johnny Carson Center, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and an Artist in Residence with the Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination, UC San Diego. https://roberttwomey.com/
https://beallcenter.uci.edu/events/emergent-narrative-systems-smith-twomey