Simon Penny

Simon Penny is an Australian interdisciplinary artist and theorist in the fields of digital cultural practices, mechatronics, interactive art and embodied cognition. His career spans artistic practice, technical research, theoretical writing, pedagogy and institution building. Trained in sculpture with a focus on installation and kinetic sculpture, Penny moved into custom sensor-driven interactive installation and robotic sculpture in the 1980s. In the mid-1980s he occupied the Australian studio at PS1 Long Island. In the 1990s he was professor of art and robotics (with tenure) at Carnegie Mellon University, a joint appointment between the College of Fine Arts and the Robotics Institute. He joined UC Irvine in 2000 to establish an interdisciplinary graduate program, Arts Computation Engineering (ACE). He was founding faculty of the UC Irvine Digital Arts minor and directed the CTSA Mechatronics Lab. At UC Irvine he holds faculty positions in music, informatics and art. He currently teaches A Cultural History of the Anthropocene, Art and Sustainability and How to Be Clever With Stuff.

Over 30 years, he has created interactive and robotic installations that address critical issues at the intersection of culture and technology. His work draws from artistic traditions including sculpture, video art, installation and performance, as well as from theoretical research in embodied cognition, ethology, neurology, phenomenology, human-computer interaction, ubiquitous computing, robotics, critical theory and cultural and media studies. Informed by these sources, he designs and builds artworks that use custom sensor and effector technologies. Penny’s projects include the autonomous robotic artwork Petit Mal (early 1990s); the machine-vision-based interactive digital video work Fugitive, exhibited at the opening of ZKM in Karlsruhe, Germany, in 1997; Traces, a 3D machine-vision-driven immersive interactive work presented at Ars Electronica in 1999; and Fugitive Two, commissioned by the Australian Centre for the Moving Image in Melbourne in 2000 and premiered there in 2004. Penny later shifted focus to explore Pacific Indigenous traditions of seafaring, boatbuilding and navigation, which gave rise to the long-running Orthogonal Project. His recent art projects include a dynamic AI self-portrait, Professor Simsimon — Portrait of the Artist as a Professor. (See simonpenny.net for details of artworks and publications.)

Publications: His major monograph Making Sense: Cognition, Computing, Art and Embodiment was published by MIT Press in 2017 and in Chinese by Huazhong Academic Press in 2025. His second major monograph is Skill: Making, Cognition, Neuroscience (Routledge, 2026). He edited one of the first anthologies on digital media arts, Critical Issues in Electronic Media (SUNY Press, 1995). Penny has published more than 100 academic papers and lectured widely internationally on digital cultural practices. His work has been translated into French, German, Spanish, Japanese, Korean, Finnish and Polish.

Conferences, curatorial: He curated Machine Culture, widely regarded as the first international survey of interactive art (SIGGRAPH ’93), and edited the accompanying catalog and anthology. He directed the 2009 Digital Arts and Culture Conference (DAC09), A Body of Knowledge (2016, with NSF funding) and An Ocean of Knowledge (2017).

Residencies and awards: He held an extended residency at Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie in Karlsruhe, Germany, in the mid-1990s. He came to UC Irvine after a period as European professor of interactive environments in the European Ph.D. in digital cultures from 2000 to 2001, a joint position between the Merz Academy Stuttgart and Portsmouth College of Art, U.K. Over the same period he was guest professor in media theory at CSIM (Cognitive Systems and Interactive Media), Pompeu Fabra University, Barcelona. In 2010 he held a residency at Northwestern University jointly supported by the Segal Institute for Human-Centered Design and the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities. In 2014 he was the first Labex Professor, a residency co-sponsored by Université Paris 8 and ENSAD (École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs). He has received funding and residencies from the Daniel Langlois Foundation for Science and Art (Canada), ZKM, GMD, WDR (Germany) and other organizations.

Juries: Penny has served on juries, boards and review committees for organizations including the National Research Council of the National Academies, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Daniel Langlois Foundation for Science and Art, the VIDA Art and Artificial Life Award of the Telefónica Foundation, the international board of ISEA (International Symposium on Electronic Art), and the Banff New Media Institute.