Simon Penny has worked at the intersections of computing and the arts for 30 years, building interactive systems that attend to embody experience and gesture. His interactive, immersive and robotic installations, such as “Fugitive”, “Traces” and “Petit Mal” are sensitive to sensorimotor modalities of aesthetic response. He explores - through both artistic and scholarly work - dimensions of the fundamental problems encountered when machines for abstract mathematico-logical procedures are interfaced with cultural practices. His book Making Sense - Cognition, Computing, Art and Embodiment (MIT press Dec 2017) reviews computational and non-computational theories of cognition with particular reference to arts practice and embodied practices in general.

Penny was professor of Art and Robotics at Carnegie Mellon in the 1990s, and later European Professor of Interactive Environments at the Merz Akademie Stuttgart. He came to University of California Irvine in 2001 to establish the Arts Computation Engineering (ACE) interdisciplinary graduate program, which operated from 2003 -2011. He was resident theorist on the faculty of the Cognitive Systems and Interactive Media Masters at University Pompeu Fabra Barcelona 2005-2013 and was Labex Professor at Université Paris 8 and ENSAD in 2014.