Simon Penny

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.