Simon Graeme Penny is an Australia

Australia

Australia , officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country in the Southern Hemisphere comprising the mainland of the Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous smaller islands in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. It is the world's sixth-largest country by total area...

n artist, theorist, curator and teacher in the field of Interactive Media Art

Interactive art

Interactive art is a form of installation-based art that involves the spectator in a way that allows the art to achieve its purpose. Some installations achieve this by letting the observer or visitor "walk" in, on, and around them; Some others ask the artist to become part of the artwork.Works of...

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Early life

Penny was born in Melbourne

Melbourne

Melbourne is the capital and most populous city in the state of Victoria, and the second most populous city in Australia. The Melbourne City Centre is the hub of the greater metropolitan area and the Census statistical division—of which "Melbourne" is the common name. As of June 2009, the greater...

, Australia in 1955. He attended Newington College

Newington College

Newington College is an independent, Uniting Church, day and boarding school for boys, located in Stanmore, an inner-western suburb of Sydney, New South Wales, Australia....

 (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

Penny has held positions as Lehrauftrag 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. In addition to creating numerous artistic installations, he edited the anthology Critical Issues in Electronic Media (1995).

Exhibitions

Since the 1980’s Penny has been creating electronically sophisticated robotic installations, curating shows such as Machine Culture at Siggraph

SIGGRAPH

SIGGRAPH is the name of the annual conference on computer graphics convened by the ACM SIGGRAPH organization. The first SIGGRAPH conference was in 1974. The conference is attended by tens of thousands of computer professionals...

 ’93, and writing about Digital Culture and Electronic Media Art. One of his most recent projects is a collaboration with Bill Vorn entitled “Bedlam,” which is described on the UCIrvine website as a “telerobotic/telematic interactive installation with machine vision, spatialised interactive sound and custom pneumatic robotics.” In 2001 he was awarded a grant from the Langlois Foundation (with Bill Vorn). Penny is currently working on an immersive interactive installation entitled “Body Electric” in collaboration with Dr. Malcolm McIver, Center for Neuromorphic Systems Engineering, Caltech and Art Center College of Design

Art Center College of Design

Art Center College of Design is a private college located in Pasadena, California, and was cited by BusinessWeek as one of the 60 best design schools in the world. The college’s industrial design program is consistently ranked number one by both DesignIntelligence and U.S...

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Professorship

Penny is currently a Professor in the departments of Studio Art and Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of California, Irvine

University of California, Irvine

The University of California, Irvine , founded in 1965, is one of the ten campuses of the University of California, located in Irvine, California, USA...

, where he founded the Arts, Computation and Engineering (ACE) graduate program.

Notable works

• Body Electric (2006) - http://www.eng.uci.edu/node/182
• Fugitive II (2004) - http://www.acmi.net.au/fugitive.jsp
• Bedlam (2003)- http://billvorn.concordia.ca/robography/Bedlam.html
• Traces (1999) - http://turing.ace.uci.edu/penny/works/traces/Tracescode.html
• Petit Mal (1993) - http://www.ace.uci.edu/penny/works/petitmal/petitcode.html
• Big Father (1991-1992) - http://turing.ace.uci.edu/penny/works/bigfather/bigfathercode.html
• Pride of Our Young Nation (1990-1991) http://turing.ace.uci.edu/penny/works/pride/pridecode.html
• Lo Yo Yo (1988) - http://turing.ace.uci.edu/penny/works/loyoyo/loyoyocode.html
• Stupid Robot (1987) - http://turing.ace.uci.edu/penny/works/stupidrobot/stupidrobotcode.html

External links

• http://www.ace.uci.edu/
• http://www.eng.uci.edu/user/150
• http://today.uci.edu/Features/profile_detail.asp?key=119
• http://www.flickr.com/photos/nearnearfuture/95468533/
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aBkm9mUkRMM
• http://www.ri.cmu.edu/people/penny_simon.html
• http://www.ntticc.or.jp/pub/ic_mag/ic014/penny/penny_e.html
• http://marynowsky.wordpress.com/2006/03/06/simon-penny/
• http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0425/is_n3_v56/ai_20377586
• http://www.adaweb.com/context/events/moma/bbs5/penney.html
• http://cultronix.eserver.org/sommer/
• http://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/firstperson/piezo
• http://mailman.thing.net/pipermail/idc/2006-March/000270.html

Essays

• Traces: Wireless full body tracking in the CAVE
• The Virtualisation of Art Practice: Body Knowledge and the Engineering World View
• Agents as Artworks and Agent Design as Artistic Practice
• Embodied Cultural Agents: at the intersection of Art, Robotics and Cognitive Science
• Virtual Reality as the End of the Enlightenment Project
• Why do we want our machines to seem alive?
• Consumer Culture and the Technological Imperative: The Artist in Dataspace
• The Darwin Machine: Artificial Life and Interactive Art
• From A to D and back again: The emerging aesthetics of Interactive Art