engineering

Simon Penny

Simon Penny is a engineering topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand Simon Penny rather than just read about it. In short: Simon Graeme Penny (born 19 October 1955) is an Australian artist, theorist, curator and teacher in the fields of digital cultural practices, embodied interaction and interactive art. Early life Penny was born in Melbourne, Australia in 1955.

Key takeaways

Simon Penny belongs to engineering; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect Simon Penny to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of Simon Penny from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

Simon Graeme Penny (born 19 October 1955) is an Australian artist, theorist, curator and teacher in the fields of digital cultural practices, embodied interaction and interactive art.

Early life Penny was born in Melbourne, Australia in 1955. Penny is the older brother of Benjamin Penny (1959) an academic specialising in religious and spiritual movements in modern and contemporary China. He attended Newington College (1968–1973) before receiving an undergraduate diploma in Fine Art from the South Australian School of Art in 1979. He then went on to get his graduate degree form the Sydney College of the Arts in 1982 after which he began focusing on electronic and time-based media.

Appointments and professorship Penny has held positions as Lecturer at City Art Institute, Sydney from 1984 to 1988, Professor at the University of Florida in 1989 and Professor at Carnegie Mellon University from 1993 to 2001. Since 2001 he has been a professor at University of California, Irvine, where he founded the Arts, Computation and Engineering (ACE) graduate program that was active from 2003 to 2011. He has been a guest professor at the Interdisciplinary Master in Cognitive Systems and Interactive Media (CSIM) at Pompeu Fabra University, (Barcelona) from 2007 to 2013. He is currently resident faculty at the Department of Studio Art at UCI’s Claire Trevor School of the Arts where he teaches mechatronic art, media art history and theory, and contemporary cognitive science and philosophy of mind.

Artistic career 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 Petit Mal, 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 Sympathetic Sentience, Sympathetic Sentience II, Fugitive and Traces among other works and, more recently, Phatus.

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 Making Sense – Cognition, Computing, Art and Embodiment (MIT press 2017). 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 Critical Issues in Electronic Media (SUNY Press 1995). He has spoken widely on Digital Cultural Practices around the world. He directed and produced Digital Art and Culture 2009 (DAC09) conference (subtitled Beyond Media – Embodiment and Context; A Body of Knowledge – Embodied Cognition and the Arts conference UCI 2016; and An Ocean of Knowledge – Pacific Seafaring, Sustainability and Cultural Survival, 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."

Notable works Phatus (2010) Walleye (2006-2009) Body Electric (2006) Fugitive II (2004) Bedlam (2003) Traces (1999) Petit Mal (1993) Big Father (1991–1992) Pride of Our Young Nation (1990–1991) Lo Yo Yo (1988) Stupid Robot (1987)

See also Critical making Critical technical practice Robotic art

References

External links http://simonpenny.net http://www.faculty.uci.edu/profile.cfm?faculty_id=4664

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with Simon Penny

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what Simon Penny claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In engineering, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to Simon Penny before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about Simon Penny ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of Simon Penny

In research: Simon Penny appears in engineering research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses Simon Penny in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: Simon Penny is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics 1955 births, American contemporary artists, American roboticists, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for Simon Penny outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

Affiliate

Preply — study more efficiently by working with a personal tutor. 50% off.

How to study Simon Penny in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what Simon Penny means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain Simon Penny out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is Simon Penny in simple terms?

Simon Graeme Penny (born 19 October 1955) is an Australian artist, theorist, curator and teacher in the fields of digital cultural practices, embodied interaction and interactive art. Early life Penny was born in Melbourne, Australia in 1955.

Why does Simon Penny matter?

Because it connects several engineering ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study Simon Penny?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on Simon Penny.