Free Public Keynote Lecture. All welcome! Please feel free to distribute this invitation.
Professor Simon Penny (University of California, Irvine)
60 Years of Situated Machines – Robotic Art as a site for technical and aesthetic innovation, activism and intervention
Presented by the Digital Cultures Program and the Centre for Social Robotics at the University of Sydney.
Synopsis:
This keynote will attempt to provide a context for the assessment of the contemporary condition of robotic cultural practices by reviewing the history of the field and the history of pertinent ideas and debates. In particular, attention will be drawn to the context of ‘cultural robotics’ as a highly charged cross disciplinary test-environment in which platonist computationalist approaches confront phenomenological realities of being-in-the-world. In the context of doing robotics for other-than-instrumental purposes, the politics and pragmatics of paradigms of top-down control confront the performative and processual practices of the arts. Questions of material instantiation, structural coupling and machine sensing provoke the reconsideration of notions of (machine) intelligence according to post-cognitivist paradigms. Interventionist and activist practices as well as emerging neo-formalist sensibilities will be discussed. The presentation will be illustrated with images and video of relevant works.
Bio:
Simon Penny has worked as an artist, theorist, teacher and organiser in Digital Cultural Practices, Embodied Interaction, Interactive and Robotic Art for 25 years. His works involve custom robotic and sensor systems including novel machine vision systems. His art and writing address critical issues arising around enactive and embodied interaction, informed by traditions of practice in the arts including sculpture, video-art, installation and performance, and by ethology, cognitive science, phenomenology, human-computer interaction, ubiquitous computing, robotics, critical theory, cultural studies, media studies and Science and Technology Studies. He founded the Arts Computation Engineering interdisciplinary graduate program (ACE) at University of California, Irvine. He was previously Professor of Art and Robotics at Carnegie Mellon.
This event is part of the Robot Cultures research initiative and Cultures of Robotics Symposium <www.robotcultures.org> organised by the Digital Cultures Program and the Centre for Social Robotics at the University of Sydney.
Organising Committee:
Digital Cultures: Dr Kathy Cleland, Dr Chris Chesher and John Tonkin.
Centre for Social Robotics: Dr Mari Velonaki and Dr David Rye.
Leave a Reply