Simon Penny

Virtual Bounds: a teleoperated mixed reality

This paper introduces a mixed reality workspace that allows users to combine physical and computer-generated artifacts, and to control and simulate them within one fused world. All interactions are captured, monitored, modeled and represented with pseudo-real world physics. The objective of the presented research is to create a novel system in which the virtual and physical world would have a symbiotic relationship. In this type of system, virtual objects can impose forces on the physical world and physical world objects can impose forces on the virtual world. Virtual Bounds is an exploratory study allowing a physical probe to navigate a virtual world while observing constraints, forces, and interactions from both worlds. This scenario provides the user with the ability to create a virtual environment and to learn to operate real-life probes through its virtual terrain.

Rigorous Interdisciplinary Pedagogy Five Years of ACE

The emergence of media-arts and digital cultural practices has provided a highly charged context for the development of interdisciplinary pedagogy, combining as it does, practices and traditions from historically, culturally and theoretically wildly divergent disciplines. This article addresses aspects of effective interdisciplinary educational process, attending to questions of pedagogy, theory and institutional pragmatics. In my analysis, the key components of such a project are: deep technical training and understanding; deep training in artmaking and cultural practice; deep theoretical and historical contextualization, and an open and rigorous interdisciplinary context which maximally facilitates the negotiation of these often divergent ways of thinking and making. In building such interdisciplinary practice in the context of a campus, one abruptly confronts the discontinuity between the rapidly changing fluidity of the contemporary moment and the relative stasis of institutionalized disciplines which have an investment in maintaining their identity in the face of such change. Implicit in the project then, is not simply the development of a context for deep interdisciplinary invention, but the formation of practitioners who are neither artists nor engineers, or who are equal parts both. In either case, this formation confounds the disciplines and creates a vacuum of institutional context, which has resounding implications for the survival and flourishing of such initiatives and their practitioners.

Twenty years of artificial life art

This essay begins with discussion of four relatively recent works which are representative of major themes and preoccupations in Artificial Life Art: ‘Propagaciones’ by Leo Nuñez; ‘Sniff’ by Karolina Sobecka and Jim George; ‘Universal Whistling Machine’ by Marc Boehlen; and ‘Performative Ecologies’ by Ruari Glynn. This essay is an attempt to contextualise these works by providing an overview of the history and forms of Artificial Life Art as it has developed over two decades, along with some background in the ideas of the Artificial Life movement of the late 1980s and 1990s.1

Emergence, agency, and interaction-notes from the field

This article describes the development of several interactive installations and robotic artworks developed through the 1990s and the technological, theoretical, and discursive context in which those works arose. The main works discussed are Petit Mal (1989–1995), Sympathetic Sentience (1996–1997), Fugitive I (1996–1997), Traces (1998–1999), and Fugitive II (2001–2004)—full documentation at (www.simonpenny.net/works). These works were motivated by a critical analysis of cognitivist computer science, which contrasted with notions of embodied experience arising from the arts. The works address questions of agency and interaction, informed by cybernetics and artificial life.

Self-organization and novelty: Pre-configurations of emergence in early British cybernetics

Emergence appears in the literature as related to self-organization and novelty. For many authors it is the result of multiple interactions among agents within a system, which generate phenomena that could not be understood, nor anticipated, through the analysis of the elements and their behaviors in isolation. For others, emergent phenomena are related to fundamental novelty and, thus, to creativity. These two formulations of emergence can be traced back to the experimental work of some key early cybernetic experimental devices by Ross Ashby, Grey Walter and Gordon Pask. As a group, the devices illustrate the potential of both formulations of emergence and of its combination. As such, they can help with the elaboration of a framework to understand emergence in the context of interactive art and communication, both to analyze its presence in interactive systems and to design systems that aim to generate them.

Introduction to the special issue DAC09 After media: embodiment and context

This edition of Digital Creativity is drawn from the Digital Art and Culture 2009 conference, held at the University of California, Irvine, in December 2009. DAC09 was the eighth Digital Art and Culture conference series, the first being in 1998. The DAC conference series is recognised for its progressive interdisciplinarity, its intellectual rigour and its responsiveness to emerging practices and trends. As director of DAC09, it was these qualities that I aimed to foster at the conference. The collection of papers in this volume is indicative of the diversity and the vigour of the community which came together for the conference. They exhibit a breadth of concerns in the field and they capture some key contemporary issues and have in common a well-informed theoretical and historical base.

Tangled reality

Leonardo da Vinci was a strong advocate for using sketches to stimulate the human imagination. Sketching is often considered to be integral to the process of design, providing an open workspace for ideas. For these same reasons, children use sketching as a simple way to express visual ideas. By merging the abstraction of human drawings and the freedom of virtual reality with the tangibility of physical tokens, Tangled Reality creates a rich mixed reality workspace. Tangled Reality allows users to build virtual environments based on simple colored sketches and traverse them using physical vehicles overlayed with virtual imagery. This setup allows the user to “build” and “experience” mixed reality simulations without ever touching a standard computer interface.