On March 30th we hosted our second annual AI Filmmaking Hackathon. Co-organized with Dan Novy (novysan) and Ash Eliza Smith.

Over the course of 8.5 hours, our student teams made 8 short films dealing with true fakes and fake truths. Thank you @cinema16unl, @disembodbods, @novysan42, and all of our participants for making this happen. And thank you Kwakiutl Dreher, Bryan Wang, and Phillip Alvelda for serving as VIP judges and Robert Tercek as special guest facilitator.

Films dropping soon at go.unl.edu/aifilm.

Amy, Hortense and I have written about our project Beyond the Black Box for Human Robot Interaction (HRI) 2024 in Boulder, Co.

Beyond the Black Box: Human Robot Interaction through Human Robot Performances

Amy Eguchi, Hortense Gerardo, and Robert Twomey. 2024. Beyond the Black Box: Human Robot Interaction through Human Robot Performances. In Companion of the 2024 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human- Robot Interaction (HRI ’24 Companion), March 11–14, 2024, Boulder, CO, USA. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 5 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3610978.3640577

Hortense Gerardo, Amy Eguchi, and I will lead a Robot Cabaret experience at the International Council on Systems Engineering (INCOSE) International Workshop on January 29th.

Together with Ash Eliza Smith, I’m playtesting a new interspecies theater piece at Worlds in Play! Join us this January 3-7 at ASU Media and Immersive eXperience (MIX) Center in Mesa, Arizona and step into the artist’s studio as they experiment with adventurous participatory projects at various stages of development, including immersive theatre, XR, Alternate Reality Games, Table Top Role Playing Games, social practice, food experiences, collaborations with AI, parties, and larps.

I’m pleased to be presenting at the Ag4Space symposium we are hosting this Thursday/Friday in the East Campus Union at UNL. This is part of our Grand Challenge project SPACE2 (Space, Policy, Agriculture, Climate, and Extreme Environment). 

I’ll be speaking on the role of speculative design and experimental arts practices in developing space science: “Ag4Space: Speculative Design, Demos + Installations – A Primer”.

I’m delighted to have my project “A Machine for Living In” featured by Thuto Durkac-Somo in his article “System Settings” for the Canadian Center for Architecture. It weaves together design, domesticity, and our evolving relationships to smart homes and networked architecture. Check it out!

I presented a paper “The Future of Real-Time AI: Liveness, Co-Creation, and Participatory Play”—written with Ash Eliza Smith—for SLSA 2023 at ASU. This was part of a tremendous panel on “Contacting, Playing, and Designing with Aliens”, with a lively discussion.