Jonathan Penvose
Assistant Professor Adjunct
Jon Penvose is an architectural technologist and co-founder of OKIE5, where he serves as Special Projects Lead. His work connects virtual production, artificial intelligence, and architectural computation to produce commercial products, interactive systems, and design platforms. Early experiments included AI R&D work at Scissor Films, where he developed custom software and hardware components for virtual production shoots and contributed to major game-industry cinematics such as Tekken 8: The Story So Far featuring Brian Cox and Persona 3: Seal Your Fate featuring Aidan Gallagher. During this time he also served as an AI developer and integrations engineer for Lifeforms.io’s Planet Garden project, where he designed and implemented an AI-driven swarm of agents named GAIA. With OKIE5 he has led the development of OTTO, WebCTRL, OBBO, OKIE5-AI (a Food4Rhino plugin), and a range of experimental and commercial tools.
Jon has also developed AI-integration systems and computational design workflows for organizations such as POA, PARTISANS, Cumulus, and numerous artists and research groups. His work has been exhibited at the A+D Museum, SCI-Arc, the Venice Biennale CITYX Virtual Exhibition, and Pacific Standard Time Museum.
He currently teaches computational design and algorithmic methods at the University of Pennsylvania’s Weitzman School of Design in the MSD-RAS program and at The Cooper Union, where his courses explore emerging integrations between architecture, fabrication, and machine intelligence. He has taught at Kent State University, Houdini School, the Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Paraná (PUCPR) in Brazil, and UT Austin (Honorarium), and has hosted AI-focused workshops at SCI-Arc, UCLA, WashU, Kent State, and UT Austin.
Jon holds postgraduate degrees from SCI-Arc, where he developed “Pro-Futures,” an AI-driven multimodal story-generation platform that integrated text, image, audio, and video generation into a single real-time system. His work earned the Hsinming Fung + Craig Hodgetts Postgraduate Award and the A+D Museum’s AI & Generative Art Award.
Jon's CV is available here.
Projects
Pro-Futures
Pro-Futures is an interactive application that produces films based on a user’s input. The user provides a style, author, graphic preference, and a prompt. Pro-Futures provides the user with a film told in the framework of a para-fictional documentary. These documentaries describe possible futures based on data extrapolations and thought experiments when pushed to their limits. The resulting films give the user a hint of what it would be like to swim in a flood, or what happens if the ramblings around the communal office water cooler are extrapolated past their hypothetical scenarios.
Planet Garden
At the heart of the Planet Garden Wiki is GAIA, an advanced AI system that coordinates the relationships, actions, and content generated by various sub-agents. GAIA uses multiple AI models to process diverse inputs like text and images. It dynamically compiles, edits, and updates the wiki content as players engage with the game environment. GAIA's design relies on a network of AI agents, each specializing in different tasks. These agents work together to generate new entries and update the wiki based on real-time data from the game. This integration allows for a richer and more accurate representation of the game world, offering players a deeper understanding of the complex systems at play.
Game Design & Art Direction: Damjan Jovanovic
Lead Designer: Lidija Kljakovic
AI-Developer: Jon Penvose
Systems Design: Ben Elmer
Publication & Web Design: Eva Besmerti
OKIE5-AI
OKIE5-Ollama4Rhino is a powerful Rhino Grasshopper plugin that connects your local Grasshopper environment to large language models (LLMs) running on Ollama, enabling natural language design workflows, agentic command routing, and real-time context-aware modeling.
Developed by OKIE5, this plugin bridges Rhino with LLM AI-assisted design tools providing a fully local, secure, and license-transparent plugin.
Access Ollama locally through your Rhino8/Grasshopper interface using our custom plugin at Food4Rhino!
Persona3 - Reload
‘Seal Your Fate’ featuring Aidan Gallagher was in collaboration with SEGA of America & Petrol Advertising is a live-action trailer to promote the release of Persona3 - Reload. Our talent performed on a treadmill that was modified for remote control using a Raspberry Pi running the QNX operating system. Custom modifications were made to the treadmill by removing its original control panel, user interface, and sensor systems. These were replaced by our QNX software solution that simulated these functions using the Raspberry Pi along with our custom control panel. To control the treadmill, we integrated a Stream Deck as the primary remote. This allowed us to adjust the speed, incline, and deceleration protocols easily and at a safe distance during the performance.
D'Sync
Most objects that you find on a podium in the center of a gallery are kept behind felt ropes and behind thick glass. Often accompanied by sign saying either, "do not touch" or "keep out of reach from children". The object located in this gallery is the opposite. It does not want to be looked at, it wants to be held. The motions of the object and the users interaction affect how the scene changes on the wall. D'Sync is a buttonless remote that alters the scene you see on the wall before you. Each nudge, rotation, and wiggle causes an reaction. You must pick up the object to see the changes. But, who knows? It may even listen and react if you talk to it.
