IDEAS Season Opening Event - BFF - Robert Twomey & Jesse Fleming

On Thursday, January 29, the Qualcomm Institute’s IDEAS series opens its new season with BFF by Robert Twomey & Jesse Fleming, a performance-lecture on the nature of LLMs, AI alignment problems, and frontiers of machine intimacy—conducted through a walk and talk with a robot dog.

Thursday, January 29th – 5 PM

Atkinson Hall - UCSD Campus

All IDEAS performances are free and open to the public.

Jesse Reding Fleming is an artist, technologist, and educator working at the intersection of AI, XR, and contemplative media. His hybrid practice—spanning performance, installation, filmmaking, and tool-building—explores the boundary between self and other through perceptual technologies. He co-founded the Johnny Carson Center for Emerging Media Arts, where he directs the Awareness Lab and teaches in new media art. His work is in the Whitney Museum and Cedars-Sinai collections and has shown at MASS MoCA, the Hammer Museum, and Creative Time. Fleming has directed films for MoMA, the Guggenheim, and Bloomberg.

jessefleming.com/ and awarenesslab.io/

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, NeurIPS, the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, and has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the California Arts Council, Microsoft, Amazon, HP, and NVIDIA. He is an Assistant Teaching Professor of Computing in the Arts and an Artist-in-Residence with the Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination at UC San Diego, where he directs the Machine Cohabitation Lab.

roberttwomey.com and cohab-lab.net

Reid Brockmeier is a creative technologist, visual effects artist, and programmer who explores a variety of mediums ranging from film to robotics and artificial intelligence and the intersections between them. He is currently a Creative Technologist for the Awareness Lab and Speculative Devices Lab at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Reid is a graduate of the Johnny Carson Center for Emerging Media Arts.

About IDEAS:

The Initiative for Digital Exploration of Arts and Sciences aims to encourage interdisciplinary performing, visual, and literary-artists, as well as engineers and scientists, to take advantage of the Qualcomm Institute’s advanced audio-visual facilities, services and personnel in staging performances and presentations of new and experimental works and research.

Visit ideas.ucsd.edu for more information about the IDEAS program.

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