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Simon Penny
Simon Penny is an artist, teacher and theorist with a long-standing focus on emerging technologies and on embodied and situated aspects of artistic practice. He explores – in artistic and scholarly work and technical research – problems encountered when computational technologies are interfaced with cultural practices whose first commitment is to the engineering of persuasive perceptual immediacy and affect. Penny has built interactive installations and robotic art since the mid-1980s. His long-standing 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 postcognitivist approaches to cognition, the subject of his monograph Making Sense: Cognition, Computing, Art and Embodiment (MIT Press, 2017). He was director of A Body of Knowledge: Embodied Cognition and the Arts conference (UCI 2016), and An Ocean of Knowledge: Pacific Seafaring, Sustainability and Cultural Survival at UCI in 2017. As a professor of art and robotics at Carnegie Mellon (1993–2000), he developed VR and robotics projects. He founded the Arts Computation Engineering (ACE) graduate programme at the University of California Irvine, 2001–12, and was Labex International Professor, University Paris8 and ENSAD in 2014.