Qualcomm Institute IDEAS Series 2024
A Girl and Her Dog Performance for QI IDEAS
Category Archives: Performance
Salon at Synergia Ranch
A Salon and Performance / Archive Convening
Hosted by Kathelin Gray, Ash Smith, and Robert Twomey
Thursday, April 25, 5:00PM to Sunday, April 28 12:00PM MDT
Synergia Ranch Retreat Center
26 Synergia Rd
Santa Fe, NM 87508
AI Theater Performance at the Johnny Carson Center
We premiered a 15 minute performance of our project Theater of Latent Possibilities at Johnny Carson Center for Emerging Media Arts Demo Day 2024 on March 22nd. This project employs generative AI for real-time performance, hinging on the improvisatory dynamics of human-machine interaction. Here we worked with the archive from Synergia Ranch / Institute of Ecotechnics, in advances of our project in April.
Stay tuned, more to come!
Project Leads: Robert Twomey and Ash Eliza Smith
Project team: Reid Brockmeier, Sam Bendix, Alex Gee, Olli Jenkins, Hank Ball, Lincoln Graham
Performance-Lecture on Embodied Interaction at SLSA 2023
I gave a performance-lecture with Hortense Gerardo and CRANE, the co-robotic arm, for SLSA 2023 at ASU. Our talk discussed perceptions of embodied intelligence and trust in human-robot interaction. This piece builds off of our previous work Dances with Robots, for Heidi Latsky’s ON DISPLAY GLOBAL 2020, and leads towards our IDEAS performance “Beyond the Black Box” at the Qualcomm Institute in May of 2023.
Continue reading Performance-Lecture on Embodied Interaction at SLSA 2023Jumping
Short, physical studio exploration. Jumping as high as I can.
Continue reading Jumping
One Way To Form A Bond
This performance explores the bond that purportedly exists between a man and their gun, and through it, investigates the nature of my own attraction to weapons and military culture. My goal was to stage a complicated and compromised version of a bonding ritual that would question the sexualized, hetero-masculinist culture around guns.
Alphabet
2004-2009 (ongoing)
This project is a durational performance focusing on the most minimal, rote mechanical interaction between a human and their computer: typing. For students of a certain era, computer education began with the alphabet, in learning how to touch type. This project rehearses that activity: as an ordered, purposeful, physical interaction with the computer, but one which is devoid of meaning. It plays on the idea of work as complicated by information technologies: each line below is 100% original, unique data as typed by the artist (no cut and paste).
Uuencode Random
Exploring the limits of attention. The difficulty of doing something really, really tedious, rote menchanical, with no value. This durational performance, transcribing the random text output of the random kernel function, is ongoing.
Heartbeat Video
2005 Studio Experiment. Stethoscope, lavalier mic, rock, various obstacles. Improvised physical exertion.
Engine Disassembly
The engine diassembly project was a series of actions in which I trained on assembling and disassembling a small gas engine, analogous to the disassembly, cleaning, and reassembly rehearsed by soldiers as a way of knowing, maintaining, and bonding with their weapons. That lost sort of mechanical intelligence. Cycles, circular motion, wasted energy.