Category Archives: Exhibitions

Artwork at 17th International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling

I have created a portable version of our Fish Phone Booth for the 17th International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling (ICIDS) in Baranquilla, Colombia December 2-6, 2024. The piece is in the art exhibition STREAMS ~ CORRIENTES online and in the Museuo MAPUKA.

The Fish Phone Sound Bath invites participants into a contemplative, immersive sound bath connecting human and ocean life through interactive audio and AI. Blending scientific data and speculative design, the piece allows users to experience underwater acoustics and explore interspecies connections. By engaging with fish behavior and ocean sounds, participants reflect on our shared intersubjectivity across species and environments.

More info: https://icids2024.ardin.online/online-art-exhibition-icids-2024/

Fish Phone Sound Bath is a project of Ash Eliza Smith + Robert Twomey (A Speculative Devices x Cohab Labs Production). Production, Graphic and Experience Design support: Sam Bendix. Developer, Design support: Reid Brockmeier. Dramaturgy: Michal Stankiewicz. Developed with support from the La Jolla Playhouse Without Walls Festival, Worlds In Play, the Birch Aquarium, and The Johnny Carson Center for Emerging Media Arts.

RSS 2021 Workshop on Robotics x Arts

J responding to Robot arm drawing

I’m pleased to present a new artwork (Three Stage Drawing Transfer) at the RSS 2021 Workshop on Robotics x Arts!

I’ll also be a panelist for the discussion with Ken Goldberg, Kim Baraka, Patricia Alves-Oliveira, and Eunsu Kang. After years working with mechatronics and various kinds of automation, I’m really looking forward to this discussion with this brilliant group of panelists!

Streaming show @ CalIT2

STREAMING
Curated by DELUGE (Stephanie E. Sherman, Ash E. Smith) and Robert Twomey http://gallery.calit2.net/portal/

Gallery Hours
January 14-March 13, 2020
12pm-5pm Monday-Friday
gallery@calit2 will be closed on UCSD observed holidays

Curator’s Roundtable
Tuesday, January 14th, 2020
5:00-6:00pm Discussion with Jordan Crandall, DELUGE (Stephanie E. Sherman, Ash E. Smith) Robert Twomey, and guests; Calit2 Auditorium. Stream Online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kR3DZh9RjWs

Cultured Data Symposium
Friday, February 7, 2020
1:00pm-5:00pm, Keynote from Shannon Mattern
Calit2 Auditorium 5:00pm-7:00pm Reception and gallery open
cultureddata.net

Eco-Streaming
Thursday, March 12, 2020
5:00pm Eco-streaming with Calum Bowden; gallery@calit2

Stream the exhibition online http://streaming.energy

Rover on VROOM

For the ACM Designing Interactive Systems/Cognition and Creativity conference in San Diego in 2019, I designed a new composition for Rover to play across the 70 megapixel VROOM tiled display at the Qualcomm Institute.

The form of the large, flat, floating screen array mirrors Rover’s synthetic image plane, and points towards further work with immersive and large scale visualization tools.

Read more about Rover here.

A Machine For Living In @ Westminster College

I am showing my project, A Machine For Living In, at the Foster Art Gallery at Westminster College.

A Machine For Living In is a digital media installation using smart technologies to explore the home as a site of intimate life. Incorporating video, sound, and sculpture, the project showcases machine observers and their memories of from within the artist’s home. Inspired by speculative science fiction and smart home technologies, this installation explores narratives of human-machine cohabitation. What emerges is a contemporary portrait of the everyday. 

Exhibition: August 28 – October 13th, Monday-Friday, 9 am-5 pm.

Opening: September 12, 4:30-6:30 PM

Where: Foster Art Gallery, Westminster College.

Press Release: http://www.westminster.edu/about/news/release.cfm?id=9271

Continue reading A Machine For Living In @ Westminster College

The Serious Business of Children @ Gallery 4Culture

The Serious Business of Children (detail), 2015. Wall drawing and drawing machine.

My new project, The Serious Business of Children is showing at Gallery 4Culture for October 2015.

Robert Twomey’s room-scale mechatronic installation, The Serious Business of Children, examines issues of meaning and expression from the oblique angle of children’s pre-language. Twomey populates his room with a number of speaking, listening, and drawing machines that communicate with one another using synthesized voices and drawings in a process of continuous translation from word to image. Audio recordings and children’s drawings are the raw material of the system. They are analyzed by computer and re-synthesized by machines. The project uses children’s early expressions as protolanguage, unintelligible in any conventional sense, but communicative in other registers.

Robert Twomey’s project was inspired by the notable American philosopher John Rogers Searle. Searle, whose expertise was in the philosophy of language, developed the “Chinese room” argument to challenge the popular idea called “strong” artificial intelligence, that it’s possible for a computer running a program to have a “mind” or “consciousness” (think Hal in 2001).