Simon Penny at Hallwalls

Announcing the premiere Buffalo LASER event:

Simon Penny
Embodiment, Materiality and Cognition: Reflections on art, technology and culture.

With discussant: Dr. Paige Sarlin, Assistant Professor of Media Study, University at Buffalo.

Sponsored by: University at Buffalo's Department of Art, Center for Architecture and Situated Technologies (CAST), and the Genome, Environment and Microbiome Community of Excellence (GEM).

Simon Penny is an Australian artist, researcher, scholar and teacher whose work focuses on the intersection between electronic/digital systems and embodied and materially engaged practices. He was part of the generation of artists to engage multimedia computing and the internet for cultural purposes. Over 30 years, he has built numerous custom electronic, interactive and robotic systems, and did groundbreaking work in machine vision and VR interaction in the 90s. His new book Making Sense: Cognition, Computing, Art and Embodiment (MIT Press, 2017) is the product of two decades of research, inquiry and reflection regarding the divergence in conceptions of cognition in computational contexts and those in the arts.

Penny was professor of Art and Robotics at Carnegie Mellon 1993-2000. He designed and ran the Arts Computation Engineering (ACE) interdisciplinary graduate program at UCI 2003-2012. He directed A Body of Knowledge – Embodied Cognition at the Arts conference in 2016 and An Ocean of Knowledge – Pacific Seafaring, Sustainability and Cultural Survival in 2017. He is currently building an experimental ocean going sailcraft (Orthogonal Project) and is establishing Greensteam, a project in sustainable steam power.

About Leonardo/ISAST:

This event is part of the world-wide LASER Talks series sponsored by Leonardo/The International Society for the Arts, Sciences and Technology (Leonardo/ISAST), a non-profit organization that serves the global network of distinguished scholars, artists, scientists, researchers and thinkers through programs focused on interdisciplinary work, creative output and innovation.

Contact: Paul Vanouse, Director, Coalesce Center for Biological Art, vanouse@buffalo.edu

FB Event page: https://www.facebook.com/events/573258416444708/