Liveness in Art and Technology Practices: Presentation and panel discussion focussed on the work of Simon Penny
A collaboration between the Attenborough Centre for the Creative Arts, Centre for Cognitive Science, Centre for Material Digital Culture and Digital Humanities.
Free event, limited capacity; register interest by emailing Matt Knight.
Simon Penny, Professor, Claire Trevor School of the Arts, University of California, Irvine
Simon is an interactive media artist who has a long history of building systems that attend to embodied experience and gesture. Through artistic and scholarly work, he explores dimensions of the fundamental problems encountered when machines for abstract mathematico-logical procedures are interfaced with cultural practices (such as aesthetic creation and reception) whose first commitment is to engineer persuasive perceptual immediacy and affect. These cultural practices mobilize sensibilities and non-propositional cognitive modalities alien to the technology and possibly incompatible with its structuring precepts: the kind of intelligence required by cultural practices involving handwork, bodywork and material engagement (crafts, “popular,” and “higher” art forms) is embodied, kinesthetic, and multi-modal.
In his digital art practice, Simon has attempted to find a way to integrate the intelligence modalities required for such 'bodywork' into alphanumeric logico-symbolic forms of expression. He has developed a critique of notions of intelligence reified in computer technologies, rooted in post-cognitivist conceptions of cognition, self and agency. His interactive digital art installations, such as Fugitive, Traces and Petit Mal, possess interfaces sensitive to sensorimotor modalities of aesthetic response. His current book project focuses on articulating a new aesthetic theory for interactive media, digital cultural practices, and the arts in general, deploying contemporary embodied and post-cognitivist perspectives to provide a language for the discussion of cultural practices which is aware of and attends to situated, embodied and enactive intelligences.
Convenor and Chair, Sally Jane Norman, Professor of Performance Technologies, Director of the Attenborough Centre for the Creative Arts
Sally Jane is a theatre historian engaged with theories and practices of live art, staging and framing devices, expressive gesture, art and technology history, responsive systems, and concepts of liveness approached through performance technologies. Writings include work on "Resistant Materials" (Contemporary Music Review), and ongoing texts on Oskar Schlemmer, Tadeusz Kantor, and motion capture.
Discussants
Caroline Bassett, Professor of Media and Communications, School of Media, Film & Music, Co-Director of the Centre for Material Digital Culture and Digital Humanities
Caroline's recent publications cover areas including digital transformation, mobile and pervasive media, gender and technology, medium theory, digital humanities, science fiction, imagination and innovation, sound and silence, and the computational turn. She has published widely on gender, mobile computing, narrative and cultural form, and is currently exploring anti-computing.
Peter Boxall, Professor of English, School of English
Peter's research has focused on the relationship between aesthetics and politics in modernist and contemporary writing, and on the history of the novel. He has published books on Samuel Beckett and Don DeLillo, and on the contemporary novel. Current work includes a book on The Value of the Novel, and a project entitled The Prosthetic Imagination: A History of the Novel as Artificial Life.
Ron Chrisley, Reader in Philosophy, School of Engineering and Informatics, Director of the Centre for Cognitive Science
Ron works in the areas of artificial mentality, especially artificial intelligence, artificial emotion and artificial consciousness, non-conceptual representation and experience, history and philosophy of computation, and philosophy of mind. Recent writings include work on 'machine consciousness', 'synthetic phenomenology' and 'virtualist representation'.