Artist, educator talks about his interactive robotic installations

Artist, theorist, educator and curator [Simon Penny] (http://simonpenny.net/index.html) discussed aesthetic, theoretical and technical issues relating to electronic and interactive art during a Texas A&M [Artist in Residence] (http://www.viz.tamu.edu/faculty/lurleen/air/) lecture held Oct. 31 at the College of Architecture's Wright Gallery.

Penny talked about the interactive and robotic installations he’s created during the past two decades utilizing custom sensor technologies, as well as “Phatus,” his work in progress, that he calls an [ Artaudian theater] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theatre_of_Cruelty) of machines in pain.

A professor of arts and engineering at the University of California – Irvine, Penny’s work has been exhibited at the Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe, Germany , Ars Electronica, an Austrian festival for art and technology, the Australian Center for the Moving Image and elsewhere.

His installations address critical issues arising at the intersection of culture and technology.

"Electronic and computer systems currently force us to encode data in a mode acceptable to the machine,” Penny told fellow artist Ricardo Zuniga. “It’s data encoding that filters out human sensibility."

Penny, said Zuniga, aims to build interfaces that relieve the user of having to encode behavior through a series of keyboards and mouse clicks to suit the machine.

“Instead, users are able to act as they would in the world, and no tutorial is needed. Penny's systems are configured to be sensitive to the user's normal human behavior,” said Zuniga.

In Penny’s video installation “ [Fugitive 2] (http://simonpenny.net/works/fugitive2.html) ,” for example, a user doesn’t use devices or learn an abstract, symbolic language.

“The user interacts with the system by normal bodily behavior, the same kind of bodily behavior they might employ on the street, the dance floor or the sports field,” said Penny. “This conception of interaction is in stark contrast to the mainstream of computer interfaces, which still require a fixed sitting body posture and the learning of a highly contrived set of finger movements in order to enter data.”

Penny has published essays on digital culture since 1987 and has spoken widely about electronic art around the world. He curated “Machine Culture,” arguably the first international survey of interactive art, at SIGGRAPH 93 and edited its associated catalog and anthology.

Penny is also the architect and founding director of the Arts, Computation and Engineering graduate program at UC Irvine, a transdisciplinary program addressing emerging practices and career paths that combine skills and sensibilities of technical and scientific disciplines with the arts and humanities.

The ACE program focuses on computational techniques involving embodied, emergent and generative real-time performance, immersive installations, artificial life, online interaction and design, gaming, and social simulation.

A guest professor in the Interdisciplinary Master in Cognitive Systems and Interactive Media program at Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, Penny has served on numerous juries, boards and review committees including the National Research Council of the National Academies, the Rockefeller Foundation, Daniel Langlois Foundation for Science and Art, the VIDA Art and Artificial Life Award of the Telefonica Foundation, the Banff New Media Institute, the international board of the Inter-Society for the Electronic Arts and other organizations.

The Texas A&M Artist in Residence program is made possible by the [Academy for the Visual and Performing Arts] (http://archone.tamu.edu/academy_arts/) , the College of Architecture and the [Department of Visualization] (http://viz.arch.tamu.edu/) .