Roy Ascott

Roy Ascott

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

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. 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.^[1] and Michael English ^[2]

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 ^[3], and Milan^[4], and one in development at Dankook University Seoul.

He taught in London (Ealing, the Slade School of Art, and Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design) throughout the 1960's. Then briefly was President of Ontario College of Art, Toronto, before moving to Minneapolis College of Art and Design, and then to California as Vice-President and Dean of San Francisco Art Institute, during the 1970s. He was Professor for Communications Theory at the University of Applied Arts Vienna during the 1980s, and Professor of Technoetic Arts at the University of Wales, Newport in the 1990s.

He has advised new media arts organisations in Brazil, Japan, Korea, Europe and North America, as well as UNESCO and the CEC, and since 2000 has been a Visiting Professor in Design/Media Art^[5] at the UCLA School of the Arts. He is the founding editor of Technoetic Arts, journal of speculative research.^[6], and an Honorary Editor of Leonardo Journal.Ascott was an International Commissioner for the XLII Venice Biennale 0f 1986 (Planetary Network and Laboratorio Ubiqua ^[7]).

Work

Since the 1960s, Roy Ascott has been one of Europe's most active and outspoken practitioners of interactive computer art, electronic art, cybernetic and telematic art.

In his first one-man show (1964) at the Molton Gallery, London (Annely Juda) he exhibited Analogue Structures and Diagram Boxes, 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, with Gordon Pask as his mentor, he was elected Associate Member of the Institution of Computer Science, London in 1968. 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 [2], Milan Triennale, Biennale do Mercosul, Brazil, European Media Festival, and gr2000az at Graz, Austria. His first telematic project was La Plissure du Texte (1983), [3] 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 Matthew Wilson Smith in The Total Work of Art: from Bayreuth to Cyberspace, New York: Routledge, 2007.

Interactive computer art

Since the 1960s, Ascott has been a pioneer of interactive computer art, telematic art.^[8] 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 championed by Norbert Wiener. 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. [4]

Current research

Ascott's work involves the exploration of what he terms cyberception[5], "telenoia" [6], syncretism, technoetics and moistmedia [7] in art. 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).

Publications

Ascott has published over 170 articles and academic papers in the journals and magazines in many countries.

• Ascott, R. (ed). 2005. Engineering Nature. 2005.Bristiol UK:Intellect.
• Ascott, R.2003. Telematic Embrace: visionary theories of art, technology and consciousness. (Edward A. Shanken, ed.) Berkeley: University of California Press.
• Ascott, R. 2002. Technoetic Arts (Editor and Korean translation: YI, Won-Kon), (Media & Art Series no. 6, Institute of Media Art, Yonsei University). Yonsei: Yonsei University Press
• Ascott, R. 1998. Art & Telematics: toward the Construction of New Aesthetics. (Japanese trans. E. Fujihara). A. Takada & Y. Yamashita eds. Tokyo: NTT Publishing Co.,Ltd.
• Ascott, R. 1999. Reframing Consciousness. Exeter: Intellect.
• Ascott, R. 2000. Art Technology Consciousness. Exeter: Intellect. 2000

His most recent (2006) publications include:

• Syncretic Reality: art, process, and potentiality [8]
• "Technoetic Pathways toward the Spiritual in Art: A Transdisciplinary Perspective on Connectedness, Coherence and Consciousness" [9]
• Syncretic Strategies [10] was presented at the SESC Conference: F.A.q. > questions on Art, Consciousness and Technology (30Nov-3Dec 2006) in São Paulo, Brazil.

About Ascott

• Packer, R. & Jordan, K. (eds). Multimedia: from Wagner to Virtual Reality, New York: Norton, 2001.
• Frank Popper From Technological to Virtual Art, MIT Press
• Amelia Jones (ed), The Blackwell Companion to Contemporary Art since 1945 (London: Blackwell, 2005). pp562, 567-9
• Fred Forest Art et Internet, Editions Cercle D'Art / Imaginaire Mode d'Emploi, pp. 26 - 27
• Margaret Boden, Mind As Machine, Oxford University Press, 2006, pp. 1088-1089, p. 1091, p. 1099

References

External links

• Masters of Media
• Pioneers ArtMuseum.net
• Factbites [11]
• From Wagner to Virtual Reality [12]