Overview

In recent years, my teaching has been exclusively at the graduate level, in association with the interdisciplinary Arts Computation Engineering graduate program I established. Consistent with a strong commitment to work against both overspecialization and the dematerialising drive of academia, I offer a range of classes addressing aspects of the field from a theoretical and historical perspectives (including scholarly writing), from perspectives of cultural production, and  regarding material (and immaterial) realisation, from project management to the fundamental realities of tool use, structural, electromechanical and electronic design and fabrication. This latter is currently a crucial aspect of ACE, for two key reasons.

Firstly, the downside of the so-called information revolution and its attnedadnt commodity economics is that students lack experience and skills with actual material and seem naturalized to the idea that providing software 'glue' to hook pre-manufactured digital commodities together offers the full territory of invention in the field. Nothing could be further form the truth. Digital commodities come replete with constraint which reflect the functions conceived by the makers. Inventive design must necessarily go beyond such preconceptions.

A second reason for emphasizing material making is to counteract the pernicious aspect of the academic mindset, exacerbated by computer technology, that material realization is an afterthough, a mindless action to be undertaken by lesser technical staff. Contrarily, I believe that high intelligence can be exercised and evidenced in making, and that this intelligence is not reconcilable with the intelligences of alpha-numeric symbol manipulation. Such intelligences include spatial, structural, mechanical and material and embodied-interactional sensibilities.

 

ACE Interdisciplinary Graduate Seminar: Winter 2007
Information, Representation, Cognition, Knowledge (IRCK)
Presented by Prof. Simon Penny
SoE 270, SotA 270, Informatics 270

This class is a broad-ranging transdisciplinary inquiry into questions of information, representation and knowledge with respect to changing technological and philosophical discourses, engaging perspectives from history, philosophy, anthropology, artificial intelligence, cognitive science, neurology, science and technology studies (STS) and other fields. Specific attention will be paid to the question of how the concept of information may have drifted over the last 50 years due to the growth of computer techniques. The nature of representation in different disciplines will be addressed, with special attention to computer science, and to theory and practice of the visual and media arts.

It would be absurd to propose that one might address all these areas in a comprehensive way in ten weeks, and that is not the intention. The goal is, rather, threefold: to expose and denaturalize assumptions, to introduce some key texts and thinkers, and to allow the student to place themselves with respect to multiple histories and on the plane of contemporary discourse.

A contextualization in basic concepts of semiotics, epistemology and ontology will emerge through the course. Such a gloss is required in order to engage questions around the kinds of knowledge which possess/can be commodified as information, and those that cannot, ie cultural and body knowledges which cannot be resolved to alphanumeric expressions. This inquiry naturally leads into exploration of the perceptual, cultural and social contexts of knowing. Situated cognition, actor network theory, intelligent agents, and theories of interaction will be discussed. Different perceptual/cognitive issues will be addressed, such as embodied cognition, active sensing and nonsymbolic 'knowledge' derived from proprioceptive and pheromonal perceptions.

 

 

 

The Living and the Life-like:

Emergence, Complexity, Artificial Life and Generative Art.

ACE Interdisciplinary Seminar. Winter 06

(Eng 270, Informatics 270, SotA 270)

Simon Penny, Professor of Arts and Engineering.

The basic claim of science is objectivity: it attempts, through the application of a well defined methodology, to make statements about the universe. At the very root of this claim, however, lies its weakness: the a priori assumption that objective knowledge constitutes a description of that which his known. Such an assumption begs the question 'What is it to know?' and 'How do we know?'.

—Humberto Maturana, Biology of Cognition, 1970.

Overview

Advances in biology over the last century have thrown into high relief the questions 'what is life?' and 'what is consciousness?'. Advances in computer technologies over the same period have raised the possibility of creating artifacts which, in one way or another, can be considered life-like. The pragmatic creation of such artifacts has become a concern in the arts as well as in the technical sciences. Interactive, robotic and computational systems exhibit behavior. They behave in some senses like living things, ecologies or societies. Traditional artworks do not 'behave'. So artists and developers working in this field get little guidance from traditional aesthetics and art theory. On the other hand, biology, neurophysiology, sociology, cybernetics, artificial intelligence, cognitive science, complexity theory, artificial life and related fields over the past century have looked deeply into this territory. In a parallel and related vein, over the last century, the reductivist, objectivist and mechanistic worldview of nineteenth century science has been challenged by a range of studies in self-organising systems, 'chaos' and  complexity theory and non-linear dynamics. This seminar brings together a wide range of texts from the above fields, in order to give a substantial introduction to the main trends of thought, theoretical resources and history of research relevant to the crafting of interactive art, autonomous agents and multi-agent systems, genetic algorithms, reactive robotics, ubiquitous computing and related fields.

 

 

 

Machine Art and the Aesthetics of Behavior, from Cybernetics to Artificial Life

ACE Interdisciplinary Theory Seminar    Fall 2004

(Eng 270, Informatics 270, SotA 270)

Simon Penny, Professor of Arts and Engineering.

Overview

This class seeks to give an overview of the history of cultural practices involving behavior and machines over the last half century, with reference to precedents reaching back centuries. This class does not focus on 'new media art' in the sense of computer graphics, video, animation, and web/net practices because such practices are image centered. Nor will it focus on electronic music and sound. Instead, this class will explore practices in which technologies perform, or manifest behaviors, or interact with each other and with humans. This practice has a long history, but has as yet been poorly historcised, presumably because its inherent interdisciplinarity and innovativeness made it too complex for art historians to attempt. So this class is an attempt to address that shortcoming. This history is seen as central to the spirit of ACE.

"Technology is all about painstaking simplification, driven often by a desire for order and predictability, which produces complex - and unpredictable - effects. It's a kind of mania for short-cuts which leads to enormous and irreversible detours. Now this is my business in a nutshell." ... "Imagine a world where every desire can be instantly frustrated, indeed where every desire can be guaranteed to arise precisely customised to the means for its dissatisfaction, where every expectation will be immediately, and yet unexpectedly thwarted. Technology cannot fail to bring about this world, since this would be a universe brought fully under control, consistent with the very nature of technology." Excerpts from "An Interview with Satan" by Frank Dexter in 'Future Natural' (multiple editors) Routledge 1996.

 

 

 

Computationalism and Discourses of Embodiment

ACE Interdisciplinary Theory Seminar   

Fall 2003

Simon Penny, Professor of Arts and Engineering.

Overview

The notion of Embodiment is critical to any theorising of digital arts and cultural practices. This is because the Cartesian dualism and the privileging of an abstract and disembodied notion of mind is axiomatic to computer science. Contrarily, arts and cultural practices are, traditionally, holistic embodied practices which depend upon perception, often active perception. We must recognise that at a basic  level, there are two dissimilar, though not contradictory, usas of the term 'embodied' in the literature. One referes to the nature of human embodied being, the other refers to physically instantiated quai-intelligent machines: robots. Along with 'embodiment', several key terms join many of these papers. These include: situation, emergence, and intentionality.

The seminar explores questions around the relationship between embodied being and digital cultural practices, through the juxtaposition of texts from diverse fields including: cognitive science, neuro-ethology, phenomenology, situated anthropology, human computer interaction, cultural studies, critical theory and art theory. These texts are assembled from diverse sources: practitioners and theorists in many disciplines address this subject. These disciplines include biology, robotics, cultural history, cognitive science and the arts. This may seem an odd mixture, but they are linked in their interest in understanding the relation between physical experience and thought or computation.  Each discipline projects upon the topic different methodologies and different preconceptions. In many cases the texts speak at cross purposes because of this. In the process of the class, we will discern the qualities of various positions.

 

 

 

Hardware Intelligence: Electronic and Mechanical design and fabrication

ACE Studiolab 277, Fall2005

Simon Penny and Tom Jennings

 

Hardware intelligence: Rationale

The interdisciplinarity of ACE is premised on reconciling the theoretical and academic with the holistic and embodied intelligences of the arts. An artist must have a deep sensitivity their tools and their medium. There is a tension between the academicism required of the university, and the traditions of bodily training and kinesthetic and proprioceptive sensitivity development so crucial to virtuosity. In many fields, computer technology is causing a problematic drift away from embodied and material intelligences. "Hardware Intelligence" argues against the dualistic academic dogma which proposes that the more engaged with the physical world a practice is, the less intellectual or intelligent it is. Far from being just a remedial skill building class, this class brings students who have been alienated from the physical world by software, back into a rich engagement with it.

The title of this class has multiple meanings and may be understood as a tautological joke. This would be a mistake. It is intended to pointedly assert two values key to ACE. First, that intelligence and manual skills are not mutually opposed, that handwork can involve high intelligence and sensibility, and that hardware can be intelligently expressive. Secondly, it asserts that 'intelligence' is not exclusively identified with 'software'. I mean this in four ways.

At ACE we like to consider the big picture, and determine what combinations of mechanical, electronic and software technologies might be appropriate to a given project. As programmable technologies have become increasingly usable, basic mechanical and electronic skills have seemed less relevant. The ACE program has a commitment to the intelligent manipulation of matter and the production of material product. By developing diverse basic skills and knowledge, this class will facilitate a comfort level and competence in the manipulation of materials, components and tools. The goal is to teach practical design and construction of electronic circuits and mechanical systems. Emphasis will be on: 

This class enables the student to imagine and develop a wider range of possibilities in material design and fabrication and will serve as a foundation for later classes and research.

 

 

 

Interactive Installation and Performance Design

ACE Studiolab Winter 2005

This studio/project based class addresses the task of coordination of diverse technologies in a spatio-temporal organization directed at artistic, cultural or social goals. Involves sensors and system design, program design, spatial and structural design, interaction/experience design, media design and narrative and dramaturgical dimensions and their sensitive integration. Projects are critiqued and developed through multiple stages, including presentations of concept, system and structural plans, hardware specification, work-in-progress and final presentation.

teaching

SIMON PENNY