Art and Embodiment with Simon Penny
University of California, Irvine | April 12, 2022
Simon Penny is a professor of electronic art and design in the Department of Art, with joint appointments in the Department of Music and the Department of Informatics.
Penny sat down for a virtual interview with Associate Dean of Research and Innovation Jesse Colin Jackson to discuss his Industrial Crafts Research Network (ICRN), embodied interaction, virtual lattes, and the best advice he ever received.
Penny is a recent recipient of a grant from the Claire Trevor School of the Arts’ Institute for 21st Century Creativity (21C), which supports artistic creation and associated research across campus. The 21C grant helped establish ICRN, an international, interdisciplinary research network of academics, museum professionals, designers, and practitioners dedicated to the study of and communication of engaged embodied knowledge related to the cognitive ecologies of mechanized production environments. As co-director and co-originator of ICRN, Penny ran the first ICRN symposium in 2021.
Penny is an artist, teacher and theorist with a longstanding focus on emerging technologies and on embodied and situated aspects of artistic practices, along with a critical analysis of computer culture. This has led him to focus on postcogntivist approaches to cognition, which is the focus of his book, Making Sense: Cognition, Computing, Art and Embodiment (MIT press 2017).
In addition, Penny researches and advocates for indigenous Pacific traditional seafaring. He directed An Ocean of Knowledge: Pacific Seafaring, Sustainability and Cultural Survival at UCI in 2017.
Jesse Colin Jackson (JCJ): Simon, you've been here at UCI for a while. Why don't you tell us about your research interests. I know that's an enormous question.
Simon Penny (SP): I'm Australian and I trained in Australia. By the late 80s, I was getting temporary jobs in the United States. Around the same time, I was beginning to engage in the (so-called) digital revolution. My training had been in sculpture. I'd worked in performance and installation and kinetic sculpture. I became very interested in in the idea of computer-based interaction, which became the center of my practice for many years after that.
The turning point was in 1993 when I was hired at Carnegie Mellon in a position they called professor of art and robotics between the school of the arts and the robotics institute. The robotics institute at Carnegie Mellon is one of the three leading robotics research centers in the country. I was enormously fortunate. It was an opportunity for me to work with the highest level of robotics researchers while I pursued my eccentric projects, which were focused on interaction from a sculptor’s point of view.
Most of the people who were involved in the early development of interactive media, were coming from visually oriented practices—filmmakers, videographers, photographers. They had a focus on the nature of the image and about narrative.
I took a radical position in a couple of ways. I was interested in embodied interaction. I developed sensor systems that responded to a person's actual bodily behavior. I was working with an installation performance sensibility, but moving that into a real time computational context.
I was not interested in narrative, really, at all. I wasn't interested in telling stories or having characters, but in exploring the degree to which a person could have a lively and engaging interaction with a sensor based automated system. I was very pleased when people would engage with my works and come out, panting and breathless and sweating. At the time, most interactive applications meant sitting at a desk and poking a keyboard. None of the works I've made included a keyboard and a monitor. I always worked with installation-oriented effects, moving objects, robotic sort of things, projected imagery and virtual reality. I made my first virtual reality project called “Traces” in the mid 90s. It was shown at Ars Electronica, later in the 90s.
JCJ: I want to interrupt, if only to give you a chance to breathe, Simon. That was great. One of the best things about these spotlight sessions is I get to learn from my colleagues. Simon and I work together. We're two of three people in what's called electronic art and design, and yet as much as we chat on nearly a daily basis, you never get this executive summary of anybody's career.
What I was going to say was, as a person who trained in interaction as a designer much later, it's really interesting to hear about making a distinction between interactivity from a visual perspective and a narrative perspective. You have a book called Making Sense. But this is making sense to me in a really clear way. Early human computer interaction was focused on interactions through the screen and narrative structures brought to the system. This is a very different framework altogether.
We have many examples of embodied interaction. Other artists have followed in your footsteps and worked alongside you in the same era. The sculptors’ perspective on interaction, a thing that we historically think of as inanimate, is different. Sculptors are all about how we approach the object in the round. There’s a time-based component to how sculptors interact with a piece in space. Essentially, you're taking that and pushing it one step further.
SP: Another dimension of this is the way that commercial development of the technology has privileged certain kinds of practices and left others out because they were just too difficult or too not-mainstream. With the development of digital applications, media art tools went from experimental technology to commodity.
One of the things we've seen quite clearly is the digitization of conventional practices. So you get digital filmmaking, digital photography, digital drawing, digital painting. I was interested in things that weren't any of those. I was interested in what we can do with real time computing that we hadn't done before. And quite patently, the thing that you can do with a real time computational system is have it respond and have behavior. Simply porting those pre-digital pre-computational media into the digital realm seemed, and still seems to me, somewhat retrogressive. They've developed their own identities clearly—CAD and 3D animation are their own things now. But it still seems to me that the possibility to model behavior was absolutely central and still is an ignored dimension of what we might call interactivity. These days, we get much more sophisticated, broad spectrum behavior on the level of the internet, on the overall level of machine learning systems.
JCJ: I want to jump in and say I would love to have a dedicated session on the problems of being new media artists. I'm thinking of your paper from the 1995 anthology. You talked about how artists adopted technology at your own risk because suddenly you're responsible for maintaining it in perpetuity if it becomes obsolete. It’s often superseded by a commercialized version. We can think of any number of artists, David Rokeby and others, who've basically invented something that becomes embedded in commercial product. The whole thing becomes impossible to sustain because you've invented an entire medium. If it doesn't become one of the mediums, e.g. digital filmmaking or digital photography, then it doesn't have enough practitioners to sustain it.
SP: There's a very strange transition. This happened during the 90s, where an awful lot of this fundamental research into, as Jeffrey Shaw used to put it, “the modalities of the virtual,” was done with kluged-together systems by artists. Artists saw the development of the technologies as part of the creative practice. That's essentially the tradition I grew up in. If I wanted to do something, I had to build the freakin machine. There were often no precedents. You just had to figure out how to do it. The point at which the modalities of that machine which you invented become a commodity, the oddness of the artwork dissolves in the eye of history. It's a very peculiar transition. Then younger students rediscover these things and think they've invented it for the first time.
I'll give you an example. When I was building, “Petit Mal”, my mobile robot in the early years of the 90s, I spent six months designing, developing, prototyping a sonar sensor system. I worked on it essentially every day for six months. And it worked. Around 2005, I had a student who wanted to build a robot with essentially the same behavior as “Petite Mal”. He bought the sensor units on the internet for $5 and plugged them into his Arduino. That's fascinating and depressing.
JCJ: If you buy the components that are in your phone, which are essentially the repository of everything that has been invented—the accelerometer, the gyroscope—they come in a little package that costs $10.
I want to steer us on a slow road towards ICRN. This is where we'll end. I wondered if you could tell us a little bit more about your notions of embodiment and why that's important.
SP: It does connect directly with the work I did in embodied interaction in digital, interactive, and robotics projects. One of one of the things that was going on at the time was there was a lot of brouhaha about virtual reality as being embodied media. There still is. It hasn't changed much. But it was wrong then and it's still wrong now.
It was very obvious to me that as a person in a VR environment, you could move in space, and you could experience a stereoscopic view of a virtual environment, but the system had no idea of your embodiment. The whole rhetoric of embodied media was completely wrong, and it remains wrong. As I quipped at the time, I think in 1991, when you go into virtual reality, you check your body at the door and take in a stereoscopic viewpoint.
JCJ: It occurred to me, just to interrupt with a pressing question: what is an embodied interaction to you? What would be a more complete version of that generalized?
SP: When you and I interact together, we manage our interpersonal space. We notice each other's facial expressions, slight winces, hand gestures, glancing to the side, looking bored. Humans communicate with humans in an enormously rich and diverse way, which is a part of our evolutionary makeup. We are animals in the world, we have peripheral vision, and so on.
None of these modalities—not to mention olfaction, are included in VR. Nor, of course, is the virtual reality illusion anything but a visual illusion. As I quipped to somebody the other day, you can't sit on a virtual chair, and you certainly can't sip a virtual latte. There are dimensions of human experience that at this point (and for the foreseeable future), cannot be replicated. So the whole idea of this Metaverse nonsense, is nonsense. It's an interactive 3D movie at best. Sensory limitations are divided according to a technological paradigm. There is a visual channel, or in the case of VR, two visual channels. And there's two audio channels with particular frequency ranges, so that they're already disconnected from each other.
We know that our vestibular systems and proprioception are crucial in integrating our senses. This is a central aspect of my thinking about embodiment, at present. As people in the world, as dancers, as sculptors, as skilled tool users, as sailors, we know through our bodies and yet acknowledgement of this: the central role of proprioception in giving us our sense of being in the world, is left out of Western philosophy almost completely.
JCJ: I know you just have, but just define proprioception for us.
SP: Proprioception is the internal body sense, which tells you where your body parts are in relation to each other, what your posture is, where the forces are acting on your body. It's the sense that permits you to touch your fingers together with your eyes closed. It's neurophysiological. It's those nerve endings in the muscles, and in the joints, in the tendons, and in the fascia, which is also an unrecognized organ of the body.
One can imagine the following in this second or third wave of virtual reality that we may or may not be in, (and certainly Facebook would like us to be in, for commodity reasons or commodification reasons): people will engage in these rather limited technologies that divorced themselves from proprioception and any other embodied sensibility. And then rediscover that, in fact, real life is more interesting than these virtual worlds. And that will be a revolution.
I'll give you an example. In the 1970s, in the US Navy, they were using flight simulators. They found that pilots who would use flight simulators tended to crash planes. That was considered a bad thing, as you can imagine (even though the budget of the military is almost bottomless).
What they discovered was that in these particular kinds of flight simulators, (which did not have what are called Stewart motion platforms), the pilot was receiving the visual experience of a moving horizon, but the vestibular system was saying, you're just sitting in a chair. What happens neurophysiologically is that the part of the brain that fuses these various sensory data, just ignored the vestibular system because otherwise the person would be confused. So then when they got back in the plane, they had no vestibular system. And it turns out, that you need a good night's sleep for those systems to hook back up again.
Now, I think there's a fair possibility that the more we become engaged in these narrowed- down sensory modalities of screen-based interaction, the more we might be editing out the complex multi-modality of our own sensorimotor behavior. There's an awful lot of anecdotal evidence that this is happening, particularly in children.
I heard from a highly regarded German researcher a couple of weeks ago, that anecdotally, schoolteachers are saying that kids can't walk along a log anymore without falling off.
I've discussed such concerns in a paper I recently wrote called, “sensorimotor debilities of the born digital generation”. There's the possibility that by tuning our awareness to the narrow sensory range of the existing media, other capacities fail to develop. These are all forms of exercise. Exercise or lose the ability. We ought to be concerned about child neurophysiological development. There is an increasing amount of evidence, varying from anecdotal, to clinical, to demographic, that some of these capacities that a child would normally develop running around in the world—catching balls and riding skateboards—are not developing.
There's quite alarming data from China, regarding child and adolescent myopia in relation to screen use. The curve of the increase of screen use over the last 15 years and the increase of myopia track each other closely. It's easy to see why. If you're a person in the world, you're following a ball that's going over there and you're utilizing saccades. You're changing focal length to track moving objects. You're used to utilizing peripheral vision and you’re often adapting to different light conditions. In the screen environment you've got an optimally lit, narrow window of view. So, as they say, use it or lose it. If you're not capturing what's out there, because it's not relevant, then you may lose that capacity.
JCJ: In some good news from that front, I've spent the last couple of days at a comprehensive school in San Diego with one of my interactive projects. It's entirely analog. Although the teachers, almost without exception ask, how come you don't add sensors and make them feed the screen? It’s an idea that I'm interested in, but I'm also glad that it’s entirely analog.
The good news is the students are still very apt at figuring out how to interact with something that is completely without explanation and has no screen component. But as you say, the fear would be that another generation further and we might get to a place where students struggle with that.
SP: There are two parts (at least) there. One of them is the multimodal, sensorial complexity of being a human in the world. And another is the tendency of online applications to construct situations in terms of a correct answer and an incorrect answer. You and I, coming out of the art tradition, know that the interesting situations are when there is not a correct answer, or errors.
Probably the best advice I ever got from one of my teachers was when I had unsuccessfully pursued a project and I was quite upset that it had failed. He said, “Art is not about getting the right answer. It's about asking the right question.” I think that's quite profound.
Reflecting on that remark now, particularly in the context of the trajectories of educational systems that we work in, and that our kids are in, the capacity to ask the right question is something we forget to teach.
JCJ: I'm going to jump to your Berkeley talk next, but I wanted to share the best advice I ever got: You're clever. So what?
It stuck with me because we have lots of clever students and they think that's it. It's always come back to me. What are you actually trying to do? It doesn't matter that you've done a clever thing. It was a real takedown.
SP: That's tough love right there.
JCJ: Simon, I know you're giving a talk at Berkeley shortly and you're going to address some of these subjects, like the changes you're seeing in students in this pandemic Zoom-verse that we find ourselves in. Tell us a little bit about that, and the embodied problems that you identified among students.
SP: Sure, I started writing this paper and it bifurcated into two papers. One of them is called “How the body knows”, which is concerned with the subjects we've just been discussing—the question of proprioception and how it is that we come to feel that we know things in the world and what influence that sense of knowing has on knowing abstract things. One of the mysteries of philosophy of mind is how do we come to have abstract concepts that we can manipulate, like notions of equivalence, or justice, or whatever they happen to be.
I'm extending arguments from other people, building on the idea that skilled practice in the world is what gives us this sense of assurance of things that we might know, that feeling that we know something and know something to be the case.
The other paper is now called, “Living in Mapworld: representationalism, the academy, and the move to online everything”. What I'm trying to deal with in that paper is the rapid movement to online simulations, both in pedagogy and research. I'm talking about psychological research and other sorts of research practices. And the recognition that everything online is a picture of something. Everything online is a representation.
I cite René Magritte's famous painting, “The treachery of images” which includes the text "Ceci n'est pas une pipe”. As Magritte pointed out very clearly, this is a painting of a pipe. It is not a pipe. And it's a painting before it's a pipe.
And Borges' story about exactitude in science, in which he talks about an ancient culture where they were so obsessed with maps that they made a map that was one-to-one scale with the territory in order to get all the details in. Then that map covered the territory and made the territory worthless. Both are important examples to think about in terms of what it means when we move pedagogical practices and research practices from the real world into representational systems. I'm not saying that representational systems are bad, and I'm not saying that we can't do interesting things with online interaction, or that studying the dynamics of online interaction is a bad thing in itself. What I am saying is that we should not presume that they're equivalent, in research practice or in pedagogy.
JCJ: There's a lot of pressure on us as educators, especially in post-secondary education, to automatically assume that these adjustments are useful, and that we should pivot our courses to certain things. It’s probably not as extreme as that, but the pressure is there. You and others have been worried about this from the beginning of the pandemic.
When we come out the other side, when that financial pressure becomes so extreme in our late capitalist university, some university administrator, e.g. me—no, not me, not my job—might realize that we can delete a classroom, turn it into office space and get rid of real estate. We're assuming that these shifts to representational modes are equivalent to the classroom in a variety of ways.
Indulge me for a moment, Simon. I don't know if we've ever talked about this. I teach an assignment where students are asked to make a map. This is a literal mapping assignment. What they don't understand going in is that the actual purpose of the assignment is to constantly correlate that map to real life. The assignment asks them to map out an area 1,000 meters in diameter around them. It challenges them to find there is no mode of representation that is adequate for the very small area around them. They also discover that they don't know the space around them because they haven't been to 90% of it, even if they think they have. We inhabit a very narrow swath of our own universe and to then be asked to represent it, even with the most sophisticated graphic skills and three-dimensional interactive tools—it’s incredibly narrowing. Often the students are frustrated with this assignment, as you might imagine, and they end up disliking maps, at least for a moment. But some of them come out the other side with a realization that all of these representations that surround us are very limited. The choices we make in creating them are more important than the facts they purport to represent.
SP: Absolutely. What a fantastic exercise. I think it's really wonderful.
JCP: What's really on the screen? What's on this side of the screen that we can't see?
SP: The reflexive move that I make in this paper, is that the modalities of pedagogy that have ported online so conveniently, are the modalities of pedagogy in the academy that are already highly abstracted and dependent on representations. It's very clear that the conventional teach-to-the-text, teach-to-the-test pedagogical style of textbook, lecture, lab, exam, that has been standard fair in many parts of the academy for four generations, is easily ported into the virtual. So even though we're moving to a different technology that one might call some sort of technological progress, the actual pedagogy is very conservative. The parts of pedagogy that are left out are the things we should be paying attention to. One of them is manipulating and working in the actual material world and manipulating materials, which is central to plastic arts educational practice. The other is the development of the Socratic method and the development of critical thinking that we do in small classes through critiques. That modality of pedagogy, as far as I know, has not been well implemented online. Or if it has, our university hasn't bought the package.
JCJ: This is going to be a bit of a leap, but I think we've opened the door to our final subject, which is your ICRN project. Tell us what it is and how looking at industrial crafts reconnect us with both manual skills and a Socratic method of learning. I do think they're both present in industrial craft.
The first question is, what is industrial craft and what is the Industrial Crafts Research Network (ICRN)?
SP: The Industrial Crafts Research Network (ICRN) is an international research organization that I have formed with a colleague in Nottingham Trent University, Dr. Tom Fisher. Tom trained as a cabinet maker, became a design academic and has a sideline in repairing French horns.
I'm committed to artisanal practices. Throughout my career, I have used relatively sophisticated technological tooling in making my artworks—different kinds of welding technologies, power tools of different sorts, precision machine tools, and so on. So, I started to think about the question of skill in relation to these sophisticated machine tools. It was something that Tom had been thinking about, as well.
To zoom out a little bit: in anthropology, and in certain areas of scholarship, the traditional crafts are valorized, and there's a lot of work looking at wood carving, or traditional ceramics work or weaving and other textile practices. There's interest in the cognitive, anthropological dimensions of these skilled practices, which have a direct connection with what we call postcognitivist dimensions of cognitive science. That is: understanding cognition as intelligent action in the world, which is the subject of my book, Making Sense.
When we look at the valorization of skills and aptitudes in our contemporary culture, we see on the one hand, a valorization of these traditional crafts practices, because they seem to be opposed to technological practices. On the other hand, we also see a valorization of human computer interaction. The new gaming culture and various aspects of utilization of digital technologies are valorized. Partly because it sells product and partly because it's a new dimension of human culture.
JCJ: So what you're saying is what kids need today are games and Etsy. These are the two ingredients of life.
SP: (Laughing) What becomes clear to me through my own practice, and through my study of the history of industrialization, is that the machine tool stands as a middle term in that trajectory from the artisanal crafts to the dematerialized information crafts.
JCJ: This is an interesting gap in scholarship. Particularly in England, but elsewhere as well, there's tremendous energy in studying and supporting the traditional guild practices in a way that we don't do in North America. But then there's this next generation of skilled makers that are not being as robustly investigated.
SP: These new (industrial) tools created new cognitive environments, which are halfway to being the sort of computational environments that we live with now. They have been almost completely ignored, in cognitive anthropology. For instance, when we set up a machine lathe, to cut a screw thread, that machine is doing computation at the same time, and in the same medium that it is cutting metal. What's fascinating about that is that there's no separation between matter and information. It is an informational process. It's an algorithm. It's an algorithm written in metal, which is then performing an action through time, like a computer program would do. When it gets to the end of that operation, there's an automatic stop, and then the worker comes back and resets. This skilled manual labor is integrated with mechanical computers.
JCJ: Before we miss this key point, we should point out that everything you're talking about is so applicable to Los Angeles as the original aerospace city. Historically, the making culture in Los Angeles has been organized around this interface of computers and artisanal practices.
The apocryphal story I was reminded of a couple days ago is—can we make a Saturn five rocket anymore? The way it's told, whether this is true or not, is no, because many of the things that were done to make that particular technological product, were not digitized and are no longer available to us. We may be able to reinvent those processes in a different way, but they would not be the same.
SP: And indeed, we couldn't remake the Apollo program. That's interesting because it tells us something about the history of trajectories of technological development and how some things are lost.
But of course, the other dimension of LA is the automobile and the freeway, which are all tied into that particular first half of the 20th century explosion of analog electronic calculation.
This is all part of a trajectory. But the argument that we're trying to make in the ICRN is that the industrial environments provided new cognitive ecologies where the actual cognition, in a sense, was beginning to be shared between semi-automated machines and human workers. That's a different scenario from hitting a rock with another rock. It's an aspect of cognition that is particularly interesting for ICRN.
It's important to note that the very notion of an industrial revolution is fiction. A wooden weaving loom is a machine. There were quite a lot of mechanized processes which did offload cognition in the way that we're discussing during the pre-industrial period—the knitting frame, the weaving loom, and many other mechanized but pre-industrialized technologies and tools, like lathes. It's a long transition, and it's a very patchy transition. Certain kinds of skills and in certain geographical areas related to certain materials become industrialized and others remain very artisanal. It's a far more complex picture than this notion of a revolution would suggest.
JCJ: At the risk of over emphasizing this point, it's exciting to me, from the School of the Arts perspective, that it would take an artist, who trained fundamentally from the hand first, working alongside scholars in various other fields to notice that we are at risk of losing the histories and knowledge of these intermediate ways of being. Along the trajectory, beginning in the pre-industrial revolution through today, there's a piece of history that's under studied and a way of knowing that's being lost.
There are so many things we could talk about. Tell us about Orthogonal.
SP: I would like to tell you about Orthogonal and I would like to tell you about my involvement with indigenous Pacific seafaring in general.
Through my explorations of embodied cognition, I started to study the last surviving remnants of the tradition of navigation and seafaring and boat building amongst diverse cultures of the Pacific. This has become a central issue in my research, as well in my in my activist activities. In fact, I was on a Zoom call with a foundation in Fiji last week who are working on reestablishing their indigenous seafaring traditions. I'm also involved with groups in the Solomon Islands and in Micronesia, and Saipan.
A third of the planet was explored and settled by people with entirely non-Western and unique sailing and boat building technologies which are utterly sustainable, being built of local materials in every case. As people moved out across the Pacific and settled virtually every habitable Island, across a third of the planet, those designs diverged. These machines were the fastest sailing craft on the planet until at least the middle of the 19th century. Western visitors attested to this for 300 years of colonialism (while they obliterated the tradition).
These people were able to navigate without instruments and without maps: no compasses, no charts, nothing. They could get hundreds of miles over open sea using such techniques, some of which we vaguely understand.
The building of the craft reflected remarkably sophisticated hydrodynamic and aerodynamic understandings, and understandings of mechanical engineering and the dynamical movement of forces. Some of this comes back to proprioception. The navigational practices involved feeling the nature of the swells while standing on the platform of the multi-hulled voyaging craft, which are often quite small.
JCP: As a sailor, you can speak to that form of proprioception, like standing on the bow of a small ship bouncing in the waves, trying to adjust six different things at the same time. It’s all by feel without really thinking because the only way to be good at them is to stop thinking about what you're doing.
SP: One of the extraordinary things that many of these cultures could do is feel the secondary swells and infer the location of islands over the horizon. The main swell would diffract and reflect and they feel the secondary swells through proprioceptive awareness – informing the sailors of the presence of islands over the horizon, or in fog. We use radar for this.
There’s a stunning range of indigenous science. I've become interested in studying those practices before they are completely lost. I’m attempting to help reestablish those practices where possible.
Those cultures are also confronted with a major challenge in climate influenced sustainability. Fisheries are being wiped out, oceans are being acidified, and sea level rise is salinating freshwater aquifers in low lying islands and making them uninhabitable.
One idea is that we could establish (or re-establish) inter-island sail-based trade and transport, as opposed to the ancient diesel hulks that do this in in the Pacific at the moment. Reducing dependence on fossil fuels, reducing the use of fossil fuels, reestablishing a community based, more sustainable mode of transport and trade. I started to explore the possibility of building a hybrid craft. This is the Orthogonal project that you asked about.
The idea of Orthogonal was to learn from the traditional sail craft designs, the sailing dynamics of the traditional craft, and attempt to merge that with contemporary materials to produce a manufacturable and locally repairable craft that could be utilized for fishing and transport and trade transport on a small scale between island communities.
I proceeded to design and build a rather eccentric 30-foot multi-hull sail craft that is attempting to make an effective hybridization of the brilliance of the traditional sailing practices and the viability of certain contemporary materials in isolated island locations, paying attention to whether it can be repaired on a beach with no power tools, with the idea that it might provide a prototype for a sustainable sail-based trading vessel.
JCJ: Unless we forget to point this out, the Orthogonal project has also been an opportunity for dozens of students to become invested in Simon's unique combination of embodied knowledge and the application of that knowledge to an actual physical product. It’s quite different than the artwork that most of our colleagues pursue, but very much in the same space of manipulation of materials, creation of artifacts, and deploying them in a highly conceptual way. I'm very much looking forward to the first sail of the Orthogonal prototype.
SP: So am I.
JCJ: Thanks, Simon for joining us today and sharing this incredibly rich trajectory and array of projects.
For more information about Simon Penny and his work, please visit his website: simonpenny.net
For Simon Penny’s recent papers (the first three are particularly relevant to the discussion above), please visit: https://simonpenny.net/frontpage-writings.html
For Simon Penny’s paper on sensorimotor debilities, please visit: https://simonpenny.net/2010Writings/SensorimotorDebilitiesInDigitalCultures.pdf