ASH ELIZA SMITH



Fluids, Flights, Feathers

Premiere: January 23, 2025
Sheldon Museum of Art, Lincoln, NE
Part of: Art + the Machine
Presented by: Nebraska Public Media, Sheldon Museum of Art, Johnny Carson Center for Emerging Media Arts, and OLLI at UNL
A Speculative Devices Lab and Cohab Lab co-production

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Fluids, Flights, Feathers is a live cinema–meets–radio theater event exploring our enduring fascination with flight—real, imagined, and remembered. Inspired by Leonardo da Vinci’s bird studies and speculative flying machines, the piece weaves together AI-generated storytelling, live sound, and spatial media to trace poetic connections between feathers and drones, migration and memory, nature and machine.

Created by artists Ash Eliza Smith and Robert Twomey and developed in collaboration with community participants from the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (OLLI at UNL), the performance invites the audience into an atmospheric, interactive world shaped by wind, motion, and the sounds of flight.

The project reflects on wind as media—both metaphor and material force. From the plains to the prairies, the wind has long carried stories: of freedom and destruction, of settler madness and multispecies kinship. It evokes da Vinci’s visionary designs and the atmospheric pressures of today’s climate anxieties, linking early innovation with contemporary questions of technology, ecology, and collective memory.

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Workshop + Performance

January 23, 2025
•Afternoon Workshop: A participatory session on co-creating with generative AI, led by Smith, Twomey, and their team, culminating in a collaboratively written radio play.
•Evening Performance: A live theater and sound experience performed with OLLI members, featuring excerpts from the PBS Leonardo da Vinci documentary and a conversation about the creative process.

The project features binaural and spatial audio, live visuals, and participatory storytelling. Future iterations may explore partnerships with bird experts such as Dai Shizuki and Tom Gannon (Birding While Indian) and Adam Larios, integrating migration patterns , bird calls, and fluid dynamics to deepen the ecological entanglements.

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Creative Team

Leads
•Ash Eliza Smith – Speculative Devices Lab, UNL
•Robert Twomey – Machine Cohabitation Lab, UC San Diego

Contributors:
Reid Brockmeier
Sam Bendix
Olli Jenkins
Elaina Franzen
Lincoln Graham
Wyatt Debben
Hannah Rommell
Jim Schroeder
Marina Kushner
Hank Ball

With special thanks to the workshop participants from the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at UNL