Marian Miner Cook
Athenaeum

A distinctive
feature of social and
cultural life at CMC

 

Fostering Intimacy with Intelligent Machines

Thu, November 6, 2025
Dinner Program
Robert Twomey

This performance-lecture (with a robot dog) presents artist and engineer Robert Twomey’s artistic research into the ways we live with, think through, and feel alongside machines. From his dissertation "Machines for Living"—a study of the smart home as an intimate site of technological cohabitation—to recent work on “communing” with creative AI, Twomey explores how emerging technologies shape domestic, perceptual, and emotional life. Central to his practice is the design of introspective technologies: hybrid systems that act as mirrors, surrogates, and partners, producing mutually revelatory encounters between human and machine. Twomey introduces BFF, a new media artwork with Jesse Fleming, in which two artist-researchers co-parent and converse with quadruped robot dogs running local LLMs. Structured as a Batesonian metalogue, BFF stages recursive, embodied dialogue about AI alignment, simulation, and attachment, offering a poetic exploration of machine intimacy at the frontiers of art, AI, and the everyday.

 

Robert Twomey is an artist and engineer studying the ways we share space with machines—creative, perceptual, emotional—and how emerging technologies transform sites of intimate life. He houses this work in the Machine Cohabitation Lab. His projects have been presented at SIGGRAPH (Best Paper Award), CVPR, NeurIPS, ISEA, and the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego. He has been an artist-in-residence with Nokia Bell Labs’ Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.), Carnegie Mellon’s STUDIO for Creative Inquiry, and a NYC Media Lab x Bertelsmann fellow. His work has been supported by the National Science Foundation, California Arts Council, Microsoft, Amazon, HP, and NVIDIA. Twomey holds a BS from Yale with majors in Art and Biomedical Engineering, an MFA from UC San Diego, and a PhD from the University of Washington. He is a professor of Computing in the Arts and a researcher with the Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination at UC San Diego.

Professor Twomey's Athenaeum presentation is the keynote for Third Annual Meeting of the World Imagination Network.

 

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Marian Miner Cook Athenaeum

Claremont McKenna College
385 E. Eighth Street
Claremont, CA 91711