Communion and Cohabitation: How best to prepare for a future living, working, and learning with machines? What new possibilities arise with the advent of always-on intelligent assistants, affordable co-robotic platforms, and creative AI?
As we invite smart technologies into our homes, workplaces, and intimate lives, we should ask ourselves to reimagine the terms of our interactions with machines.

This talk explores the relationships fostered by embedded, embodied (robotic), and intelligent (AI) computing technologies through a lens of emerging media arts practice. I present a series of projects staging experimental encounters between human and non-human agents, seeking insight into our emergent state of machine cohabitation. What shifts in this transition from human-computer interaction to deeper forms of communion and cohabitation?

Robert Twomey is an artist and engineer exploring poetic intersections of human and machine perception, particularly how emerging technologies transform sites of intimate life. He has presented his work at SIGGRAPH (Best Paper Award), CVPR, ISEA, the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, and has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the California Arts Council, Microsoft, Amazon, and NVIDIA. He is an Assistant Professor of Emerging Media Arts with the Johnny Carson Center at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

The event is free and open to the public in person or on Zoom at: https://go.unl.edu/ignitefall2021