Simon Penny – ISEA Symposium Archives

Simon Penny

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Most Recent Affiliation / Department / Job Title:

University of California at Irvine, Editor and _Professor

Past or Other Affiliation / Department / Job Title:

Carnegie Mellon University, Associate Professor

ISEA Bio(s) Available:

ISEA2020

Simon Penny (AU) is an interactive media artist, teacher and theorist. He has built custom interactive installations and robotic art since the mid 1980s. He explores – in both artistic and scholarly work – problems encountered when computational technologies and rhetorics are interfaced with cultural practices. His longstanding concern for embodied and situated aspects of aesthetic experience, along with a critical analysis of computer culture has led to a focus on what of he refers to as postcogntivist approaches to cognition – the focus of his book Making Sense: Cognition, Computing, Art and Embodiment (MIT press 2017). Director of A Body of Knowledge: Embodied Cognition and the Arts UCI 2016 and An Ocean of Knowledge: Pacific Seafaring, Sustainability and Cultural Survival at UCI in 2017. Founding director Arts Computation Engineering graduate program (2003-2012). Professor of Electronic Art and Design, professor of Music, professor of Informatics, University of California, Irvine, USA.

ISEA2011

Simon Penny has worked as an artist, theorist, teacher and organiser in Digital Cultural Practices, Embodied Interaction, Interactive and Robotic Art for 25 years. His works involve custom robotic and sensor systems including novel machine vision systems. His art and writing address critical issues arising around enactive and embodied interaction, informed by traditions of practice in the arts including sculpture, video-art, installation and performance, and by ethology, cognitive science, phenomenology, human-computer interaction, robotics, critical theory, cultural studies, media studies and Science and Technology Studies.

He edited Critical Issues in Electronic Media (SUNY press 1995), founded the Arts Computation Engineering interdisciplinary graduate program (ACE) at University of California, Irvine in 2003 and was director of Digital Art and Culture conference 2009 (DAC09). He was previously Professor of Art and Robotics at Carnegie Mellon University and teaches in the Cognitive Science and Interactive Media masters at University Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, Spain. He was artist in residence at the Segal Institute for Human Centered Design at Northwestern University Fall 2010. He is a jury member for the Telefonica VIDA (Art and Artificial Life) prize.

ISEA1995

Simon Penny is an Australian artist working with interactive and robotic installations and an associate Professor of Art and Robotics at Carnegie Mellon University. He is editor of Critical lssues in Electronic Media (SUNY Press 1995). He curated Machine Culture, on international survey of interactive art at SIGGRAPH 93.

ISEA1994

Simon Penny(Australia), interactive media artist, Associate Professor of Art and Robotics, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh PA, USA. He makes Interactive installation and robotic sculpture and is currently in danger of falling of the edge of Art into the maelstrom of technological change.