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.
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.
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!
Thrilled to join these two events at York University next Mon/Tues in Toronto! See my project a #machineforliving in ‘Disruptive Design and Digitala Fabrication’ at York U AMPD Feb 3-13.
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
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.
I have contributed live computer vision and a textual sensor feed for #projectamelia, a new interactive live performance collaboration with #bricolagetheater and #probablemodels in Pittsburgh, PA. The show will run through November 2nd.
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.
I’m showing my project Convex Mirror as part of the Harold Cohen exhibition “Creating Computational Creativity” at the University of California, San Diego. Details below.
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).