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!
I’m developing an XR soundwalk for the La Jolla Playhouse Without Walls Festival, premiering April 27-30, 2023.
This project, Cleaning the Stables, is one chapter from the Herakles Project, adapts his 5th labor as an immersive soundwalk, reimagining Euripedes story as an individualized XR audio experience with accompanying visuals experienced through viewers’ smartphones and headsets. Working from field recordings and photogrammetric models documenting the distinct features of Nebraskan and Southern Californian agriculture and aquaculture—this project surfaces structural similarities and illuminates parallel concerns in the twin Breadbaskets of the American midwest and southwest. It juxtaposes approaches to precision agriculture, cattle operations, and water rights management in these distinct geographic regions.
Mapped over the site of the Rady Shell, the listener explores a speculative future of geoengineering gone wrong as a locative media project, navigating the narrative space of the piece overtop of the physical space of the festival. Herakles is recast as an agricultural robot; water is scarce, sourced from the dwindling Ogollala aquifer and Colorado River; ”the moving sand dune” of the midwest has joined its brethren on the western coast; and we are left to reconcile the real costs and possible futures of livestock, agriculture, and scarcity in a changing environment.
The Herakles Project adapts Euripedes 12 Labors as a series of interlinked XR/AI/VR pieces. The project surfaces the existential question of motive–whether the labors were a form of expiation for the murder of his wife and children, or were they the cause of post-traumatic stress – violence begetting violence – that induced the murder of his family? These questions take on new significance in a contemporary frame.
More about the project here: http://herakles.roberttwomey.com