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Roy Ascott
Roy Ascott
Birth name	Roy Ascott
Nationality	English
Field	art, technoetics, syncretism
Training	King's College, University of Durham (now Newcastle University)
Movement	Telematic art
Works	La Plissure du Texte, Electra, Paris; Planetary Network, XLII Venice Biennale; Telematic Embrace: visionary theories of art, technology and consciousness University of California Press).
Influenced by	Victor Pasmore, Jackson Pollock, Marcel Duchamp, William Ross Ashby, I Ching, Henri Bergson
Influenced	Brian Eno, musician [1]), Paul Sermon, artist [4](former students)
Awards	Honorary Professor, Thames Valley University, London. Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts

Roy Ascott is a British artist and theorist, who works with cybernetics and telematics. He is President of the Planetary Collegium.

Contents 1 Biography 2 Work 3 Interactive computer art 4 Current research 5 References

[edit] Biography

Roy Ascott born in Bath, England. He was educated at the City of Bath Boys' School. His National Service was spent as an officer in the British Royal Air Force working with radar defence systems^[2]).. From 1955-59 he studied Fine Art at King's College, University of Durham (now Newcastle University) under Victor Pasmore and Richard Hamilton, and Art History under Lawrence Gowing and Quentin Bell. On graduation he was appointed Studio Demonstrator (1959-61). He then moved to London, where he established the radical Groundcourse at Ealing Art College, then later to Suffolk at Ipswich Civic College. Notable alumni of the Groundcourse include Brian Eno, Pete Townshend, Stephen Willats.^[3] and Michael English ^[4]

He taught in London (Ealing^[5], and was a visiting lecturer at other London art schools throughout the 1960s. Then briefly was President of Ontario College of Art and Design^[6], Toronto, before moving to California as Vice-President and Dean of San Francisco Art Institute^[7], during the 1970s. He was Professor for Communications Theory at the University of Applied Arts Vienna^[8] during the 1980s, and Professor of Technoetic Arts at the University of Wales, Newport in the 1990s.[5]

He has advised new media arts organisations in Brazil, Japan, Korea, Europe and North America [6], as well as UNESCO[7], and since 2000 has been a Visiting Professor in Design/Media Art^[9] at the UCLA School of the Arts. He is the founding editor of Technoetic Arts, journal of speculative research.^[10], and an Honorary Editor of Leonardo Journal.Ascott was an International Commissioner for the XLII Venice Biennale of 1986 (Planetary Network and Laboratorio Ubiqua ^[11]).

He is the founding president of the Planetary Collegium an advanced research center which he set up in 2003 at the University of Plymouth, UK, where he is Professor of Technoetic Arts. The Collegium currently has nodes (linked centers) in Zurich ^[12], and Milan^[13].

[edit] Work

Since the 1960s, Roy Ascott has been a practitioner of interactive computer art, electronic art, cybernetic and telematic art. ^[14]

In his first show (1964) at the Molton Gallery, London [8], he exhibited Analogue Structures and Diagram Boxes, comprising change-paintings and other works in wood, perspex and glass. In 1964 Ascott published "Behaviourist Art and the Cybernetic Vision" in Cybernetica: journal of the International Association for Cybernetics (Namur). In 1968, he was elected Associate Member of the Institution of Computer Science, London (proposed by Gordon Pask). In 1972, he became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.

Ascott has shown at the Venice Biennale, Electra Paris, Ars Electronica, V2 Institute for the Unstable Media [9], Milan Triennale, Biennale do Mercosul, Brazil, European Media Festival, and gr2000az at Graz, Austria. His first telematic project was La Plissure du Texte (1983), [10] an online work of "distributed authorship" involving artists around the world. The second was his "gesamtdatenwerk" Aspects of Gaia: Digital Pathways across the Whole Earth (1989),an installation for the Ars Electronica Festival in Linz, discussed by (inter alia) Matthew Wilson Smith in The Total Work of Art: from Bayreuth to Cyberspace, New York: Routledge, 2007

[edit] Interactive computer art

Since the 1960s, Ascott has been a working with interactive computer art, telematic art.^[15] and systems art. Ten years before the personal computer came into existence, Ascott built a theoretical framework for approaching interactive artworks, which brought together certain characteristics of Dada, Surrealism, Fluxus, Happenings, and Pop Art with the science of cybernetics . He was also influenced by the writings of Anthony Stafford Beer, William Ross Ashby, William Grey Walter, and F.H.George. A critical survey of Ascott's work is provided by Edward A. Shanken in his introductory essay "From Cybernetics to Telematics: The Art, Pedagogy, and Theory of Roy Ascott" in Ascott, R. 2003. Telematic Embrace: Visonary Theories of Art, Technology and Consciousness. (ed. Edward A. Shanken). Berkeley: University of California Press. [11]

[edit] Current research

Ascott's research [12] involves the exploration of what he terms cyberception[13], "telenoia" [14], syncretism, technoetics and moistmedia [15] in art. In Ascott’s view: “We are simultaneously present in many realities: physical presence in ecospace, apparitional presence in spiritual space, telepresence in cyberspace, and vibrational presence in nanospace. Second Life is the rehearsal room for a future in which we endlessly create and distribute our many selves. What we build today in cyberspace, we’ll build tomorrow in nano space. The new art media is immaterial and moist, numinous and grounded, while the technoetic mind both inhabits the body and is distributed across time and space. Art and reality are becoming syncretic as these contradictions are reconciled, and differences melded. Syncretic reality emerges from the cultural coherence of intensive interconnectivity, from quantum coherence at the base of our world-building, and from the spiritual coherence of our multi-layered consciousness”. Roy Ascott (2007). Syncretic Fields: Art, Mind, and the Many Realities. In: 17th International Conference on Artificial Reality and Telexistence. Ejsberg, Denmark.

He has published his theories in six books and over 170 articles and papers in the past three decades. Since 1997 much of his research into syncretism and technoetics has taken place in Brazil, in the Mato Grosso (Kuikuro), Salvador, Bahia (Candomble), Brasilia (Santo Daime), Fortaleza and São Paulo (Umbanda and União do Vegetal), and the Vale do Amanhecer (Spiritism). [16]

[edit] References