Simon Penny

Simon Penny is an Australian artist, theorist and teacher whose art practice consists of interactive and robotic installations. His current project "Traces" is a telematic interactive environment using networked CAVEs with machine vision sensing in each CAVE, while recent projects include the emergent complexity sound installation Sympathetic Sentience (I, II and III, with Jameison Schulte), and the autonomous robotic artwork Petit
Mal. Penny's projects have been exhibited at, among others, ZKM, Germany and the European Media Art Festival, Osnabruck; and recent awards include Cyberstar 98 and a residency at the Institut fur Bildmedien, ZKM Karlsruhe.

      Penny is the editor of Critical Issues in Electronic Media (SUNY Press 1995), and recent publications include: The Virtualisation of Art Practice: Body knowledge and the Engineering World View, (CAA Art Journal), and The Darwin Machine: Artificial Life and Interactive Art, (New Formations UK). He is currently Professor of Arts and Engineering, at the Claire Trevor School of the Arts and the Henry Samueli School of Engineering, at UC Irvine, and Layer Leader for the Arts, at the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology.

      Simon Penny's participation is co-sponsored by the University of Southern California Integrated Media Systems Center

        Symposium Abstract

      The dream of technologically facilitated transcendent mind, fueled variously by Gibson, Moravec and others, was the master trope of the 90's cyberculture. Yet the dream of transcending the body and a disdain for the flesh is as old as the written word in the west. It follows a line through Plato, st Augustine and Descartes. Kwinter's question: "what are the forces coaxing us to leave our body?" is easily answered, it is not a mystery. But the technology which has instrumentalised the mind-body construction in hardware-software has added some marketing rhetoric. Both dualisms are arbitrary and ultimately, untenable. The truly contemporary stance is the acknowledgement of the inescapability, the centrality and the specificity of embodiment. I build systems which affirm and engage embodied being, and critique rhetorics of virtuality.

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      Imagine there were no hypothetical situations.

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      Innovation makes enemies of all those who prospered under the old regime, and only lukewarm support is forthcoming from those who would prosper under the new. Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527)

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      It is time to recover a sense of the body as a site for embodied cognition, cognition constructed not through words but through physical interactions with procedural works. N Katherine Hayles.

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      Rethink virtuality beyond representation. Eugene Thacker

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      LINK:Simon Penny: to: http://www-art.cfa.cmu.edu/penny/works/workscode.html

      University of Southern California Integrated Media Systems Center: to: http://imsc.usc.edu/