Simon Graeme Penny is an Australian artist, theorist, curator and teacher in the field of Digital Cultural Practices, Embodied Interaction and Interactive art.
Since the 1980s Penny has been creating interactive and robotic art pieces that address critical issues in digital culture discourses, especially around enactive and embodied interaction. A central concern of his robotic works is the space of interaction between the machine and the human observer. His work is informed by traditions of practice in the arts including sculpture, video-art, installation and performance and has been shown in a number of venues and international art festivals such as ZKM or Ars Electronica. After a series of early sculptural and kinetic works, in the early 1990s Penny created , which he presented internationally from 1995 to 1997 and again in 2006 after a careful restoration that maintained the original electronic configuration of the piece. Petit Mal is a human-sized robot consisting of two large wheels and a central body that appears to continuously be re-equilibrating itself. It is a robotic work of art that "attempts to explore autonomous behavior as a probe of interactivity and the research field of A-life." Within his practice-based research on embodied interaction, he subsequently created , , and among other works and, more recently, .
Academic production
Penny’s critical analysis of computer culture and AI has engaged phenomenology, cognitive science and philosophy of mind, anthropology and cognitive archaeology. His current theoretical focus is on the application of post-cognitivist theories of cognition to the theorisation of art, design and cultural practices. This work culminated in the publication of . He has published over 80 papers on interactive and media art. He curated and produced Machine Culture – the first international survey of interactive installation – at SIGGRAPH 93 in Anaheim, CA – and edited the associated catalogue and anthology. He edited the anthology Critical Issues . He has spoken widely on Digital Cultural Practices around the world. He directed and produced Digital Art and Culture 2009 conference (subtitled Beyond Media – Embodiment and Context; ; and , UCI 2107. His essays have been published in seven languages. In his profile as an editor of the Leonardo Electronic Almanac, Penny describes his interests as follows: "My ongoing concern with the negotiation of practices, discourses and commitments in engineering with respect to those of the arts has involved an extended consideration of the history and theory of Artificial Intelligence and the forms of Cognitive Science related to it. These fields enforce a deeply dualising model of human being which is incompatible with practices of the arts. The adoption of computational technology into the arts has the insidious effect of ‘hollowing-out’ long traditions of embodied practices. I have referred to this as a Trojan Horse effect. Fortuitously, over the last two decades, a reaction to such dualising has also occurred in cognitive science. The new distributed, embodied, enactive and situated cognitive sciences address the kinds of embodied practices and sensibilities I have been focusing on in the arts."
