Robert Twomey

What excites you most about joining the UC San Diego School of Arts and Humanities community?

I am excited to join our excellent team in the Department of Visual Arts — we have a really great group of faculty, staff and strong and growing programs. I'm particularly excited to develop new courses for our Interdisciplinary Computing and the Arts Major (ICAM), but am also eager to work with students in our MFA program and also our Ph.D. (particularly the students concentrating in art practice).

I did my MFA here years ago and returned later in my career as a postdoc researcher, so I have deep roots at UC San Diego. Within Arts and Humanities, I'm eager to develop work with collaborators in Theatre and Dance, Communications, Literature and Philosophy, and also to continue interdisciplinary work with faculty in Jacobs School of Engineering, School of Computing, Information and Data Science and other programs on campus.

What drew you to your field? Why should students consider studying the arts and humanities?

When I was starting out, I was pulled in conflicting directions as an engineer (biomedical engineering) and studio artist (painting). Despite a deep history with science and technology, I was drawn to the breadth and freedom in the arts, in terms of ideas and methods and materials. I've always appreciated how we can bring the whole human to work in the arts — whether personally, or in thinking through broader social and emotional contexts.

When I was starting out, I bounced around all sorts of different situations like working a day job in a neuroimaging lab while saving vacation for art residencies or painting projects, but over time I found my way to computing and the arts. Here, we develop emerging technologies but also think through their personal, social and emotional consequences. This field has allowed me to occupy complementary perspectives — teaching and participating in traditional STEM fields like data science, electrical engineering or robotics — while developing the creative freedom and critical perspective of a practicing artist.

A career in the arts and humanities, particularly where computing intersects these fields, allows you to explore emerging technologies while understanding them in human terms. You develop technical fluency while cultivating critical thinking, aesthetic sensibilities and self-direction. Technical skills plus critical thinking is what we need today!

What research or creative project are you working on currently?

I have been working on two main projects recently. “Quantum Theater,” which just premiered in the Spatial Storytelling Program at SIGGRAPH 2025, takes quantum science as both a subject and method for playable theater. Phenomena like entanglement, superposition, coherence and collapse shape the performance in a post-AI exploration of liveness, variability and improvisation. It builds on work I have done over the last four years, like my AI Radio Plays, that explore roles for generative AI for live performance.

What’s your favorite class to teach and why?

Ooh hard to pick, I have two favorites at the moment. The first is our “Senior Projects” in Interdisciplinary Computing and the Arts, because it is such a treat to meet students at the end of their undergraduate studies and work closely with them over 20 weeks to develop and present a senior capstone project.

The other is my new “Intro to Creative Code,” which meets students at the beginning of their studies in computing and the arts. This introduces fundamentals of programming and computational thinking, but does so through the use of code as a vehicle of creative exploration and self-expression. I'm really looking forward to offering this in Fall 2025. We get a lot of ‘aha’ moments both on the ‘how to code’ side but also in finding meaning, place and voice as an artist working with code.

What is something about yourself that is not typically included in your bio?

I've been learning to surf this summer with my nine-year-old son!

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 integrates traditional forms with new technologies to examine questions of empathy, agency, imagination and desire in human-computer interaction. He houses this work in the Machine Cohabitation Lab.

He has been an artist-in-residence at the STUDIO for Creative Inquiry (Carnegie Mellon University), Nokia Bell Labs Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.), and a fellow with the NYC Media Lab x Bertelsmann AI and Creative Industries Challenge. He has presented his work at SIGGRAPH (Best Paper Award), CVPR, ISEA, NeurIPS, HRI, SLSA, 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.

Twomey earned a bachelor’s degree from Yale University with majors in art and biomedical engineering; an MFA in visual arts from UC San Diego, and a Ph.D. in digital arts and experimental media from the University of Washington. In addition to serving as assistant teaching professor of computing in the arts in the Department of Visual Arts, he is an artist-in-residence with the UC San Diego Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination.