Ash Eliza Smith and Robert Twomey

Ash Eliza Smith (CLEANING THE STABLES) is an artist and designer who uses storytelling, worldbuilding, and speculative design to shape new realities. With performance as both a tool and lens, Smith works across art and science, between fact and fiction, and with human and non-human agents (animals, plants, machines) to re-imagine past and future technologies, systems, and rural-urban ecologies. Smith incorporates strategies of liveness, play and participatory co-design to create interactive stories, films, mixed reality theater, live action role-plays (LARPs) and prototypes of the future that may solve or re-frame problems. She is an Assistant Professor at the Johnny Carson Center for Emerging Media Arts and received her MFA from the Visual Arts program at UCSD where she worked as an affiliate of the UCSD Design Lab and associate director of the Culture, Art, Technology department. Previously she attended the Performance Studies program at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Smith has presented work at Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (MCASD), International Symposium on Electronic Art (ISEA), Qualcomm Institute (Gallery QI) and Elsewhere Projects.

Robert Twomey (CLEANING THE STABLES) is an artist and engineer exploring poetic intersections of human and machine perception, particularly how emerging technologies transform sites of intimate life. He integrates traditional forms with new technologies to examine questions of empathy, agency, and desire in human-computer interactions. He has been an Artist-in-Residence at  the Studio for Creative Inquiry at Carnegie Mellon University and  Nokia Bell Labs Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T). 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, HP, and NVIDIA. He received his B.S. from Yale with majors in  Art and Biomedical Engineering, his M.F.A. in Visual Arts from U San Diego, and his Ph.D. in  Digital Arts and Experimental Media from the University of Washington. He is an Assistant Professor with the Johnny Carson Center for Emerging Media Arts and a visiting scholar with the Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination.