Roy Ascott | |
|---|---|
 Roy Ascott in 2012 | |
| Born | Roy Ascott 26 October 1934 (1934-10-26) (age 91) Bath, Somerset, England |
| Education | King's College London,University of Durham (nowNewcastle University) |
| Known for | art, technoetics,syncretism |
| Notable work | La Plissure du Texte,Electra, Paris;Planetary Network, XLIIVenice Biennale;Telematic Embrace: visionary theories of art, technology and consciousness,University of California Press; 未来就是现在:艺术,技术和意识 [The Future is Now: Art, Technology, and Consciousness], Gold Wall Press, Beijing, 2012 |
| Movement | Technoetics,Digital Art |
| Awards | Doctor Honoris Causa,Ionian University, Corfu, Greece. Honorary Professor,Aalborg University. Fellow of theRoyal Society of Arts London.Prix Ars Electronica Golden Nica Award for Visionary Pioneers of Media Art 2014. |
Roy AscottFRSA (born 26 October 1934) is a British artist, who works withcybernetics andtelematics on an art he callstechnoetics by focusing on the impact of digital and telecommunications networks onconsciousness. Since the 1960s, Ascott has been a practitioner ofinteractivecomputer art,electronic art,cybernetic art andtelematic art.
Ascott exhibits internationally (including the Biennales of Venice and Shanghai), and is collected byTate Britain andArts Council England. He is recognised byArs Electronica as the "visionary pioneer of media art", and widely seen as a radical innovator in arts education and research, having occupied leading academic roles in England, Europe, North America, and China, and is currently leading his Technoetic Arts studio in Shanghai,[1] and directing thePlanetary Collegium. In 2018, he became the subject ofCybernetics & Human Knowing: A Journal of Second Order Cybernetics, Autopoiesis and Cybersemiotics entitled "A Tribute to the Messenger Shaman: Roy Ascott".[2] Dr. Kate Sloan's comprehensive study of his early work "Art Cybernetics and Pedagogy in Post-War Britain: Roy Ascott's Groundcourse" was published by Routledge in 2019.[3]In 2025 Ascott was the subject of a comprehensive interview atArtforum that was conducted byHans-Ulrich Obrist.[4]
Ascott is the President of thePlanetary Collegium, Professor of Technoetic ArtsPlymouth University, and the De Tao Master of Technoetic Arts at the De Tao Masters Academy in Shanghai.[1] He is also Chief Specialist of the Visual Art Innovation Institute at theCentral Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing.[1] He is the founding editor of the research journalTechnoetic Arts, an honorary editor ofLeonardo Journal, and author of the bookTelematic Embrace: Visionary Theories of Art, Technology and Consciousness,University of California Press.[1]
Roy Ascott was born inBath, England. He was educated at theCity of Bath Boys' School. HisNational Service was spent as a Pilot Officer inRAF Fighter Command working withradar defense systems.[5] From 1955 to 1959, he studied Fine Art atKing's College,University of Durham (nowNewcastle University) underVictor Pasmore andRichard Hamilton, and Art History underLawrence Gowing andQuentin Bell.[5] He was awarded the degree of B.A. Hons Fine Art, Dunelm in 1959.[5] On graduation he was appointed Studio Demonstrator (1959–61). He then moved to London, where he established the radicalGroundcourse atEaling Art College, which he subsequently established at Ipswich Civic College, inSuffolk, working with artist tutors such asAnthony Benjamin,Bernard Cohen.[5]R. B. Kitaj, Brian Wall,Harold Cohen, and Peter Startup. Important to the development of his understanding of cybernetics was his friendship withGordon Pask. Notable alumni of the Groundcourse includeBrian Eno,Pete Townshend,Stephen Willats, andMichael English.[5]
Ascott taught in LondonEaling,[6] and was a visiting lecturer at other Londonart schools throughout the 1960s.[6] He was then briefly was President of Ontario College of Art, nowOCAD University,[7]Toronto and then Chair of Fine Art atMinneapolis College of Art and Design before moving toCalifornia as Vice-President and Dean ofSan Francisco Art Institute, during the 1970s. He was Professor forCommunication Theory at theUniversity of Applied Arts Vienna,[8] during the 1980s, and Professor ofTechnoetic Arts at theUniversity of Wales, Newport in the 1990s, where he established the Centre for Advanced Inquiry in the Interactive Arts. He established thePlanetary Collegium in 2003.[8]
Ascott is recipient of thePrix Ars Electronica Golden Nica award for Visionary Pioneer of Media Art 2014. The award is for "those men and women whose artistic, technological and social achievements have decisively influenced and advanced the development of new artistic directions." He is a DoctorHonoris Causa ofIonian University,Corfu, Greece; Honorary Professor atAalborg UniversityCopenhagen; Honorary Professor atUniversity of West London.[6]
He has advisednew media arts organizations in Brazil, Japan, Korea, Europe and North America as well asUNESCO, and was Visiting Professor (VI), Design Media Arts,University of California Los Angeles (2003–07)[9] at theUCLA School of the Arts. Ascott was an International Commissioner for the XLIIVenice Biennale of 1986 (Planetary Network and Laboratorio Ubiqua[10]).
He is the founding president of thePlanetary Collegium, an advanced art research center which he launched in 1994, with its Hub currently based in theUniversity of Plymouth, UK, and nodes in China, Greece, Italy, and Switzerland. In March 2012 he was appointed De Tao Master of Technoetic Arts at (DTMA),[11] a high-level, multi-disciplined, creativity-oriented higher education institution in Shanghai, China. In 2014, he established the Ascott Technoetic Arts Studio at DTMA,[1] creating the Technoetic Arts advanced degree programme, taught jointly with theShanghai Institute of Visual Art. The DeTao-Node of thePlanetary Collegium was established in 2015. He is a Doctor Honoris Causa ofIonian University, Corfu, Greece.[1]
In his first show in 1964 at the Molton Gallery, London,[12] he exhibitedAnalogue Structures and Diagram Boxes, comprisingaleatory chance operation paintings and otherchance operation works in wood, perspex and glass.
In 1964, Ascott published "Behaviourist Art and the Cybernetic Vision" inCybernetica: Journal of the International Association for Cybernetics (Namur). In 1968, he was elected Associate Member of the Institution ofComputer Science, London (proposed byGordon Pask)[12] and in 1972, he became a Fellow of theRoyal Society of Arts.[1]
Since the 1960s, Ascott has been working withinteractive art,computer art,telematic art,[13] andsystems art. Ascott built a theoretical framework for approachinginteractive artworks, which brought together certain characteristics ofDada,Surrealism,Fluxus,Happenings, andPop Art with the science ofcybernetics.[14][15] He was also influenced by the writings ofGordon Pask,Stafford Beer,William Ross Ashby, andF.H. George.[16]
Ascott has shown at theVenice Biennale,Shanghai Biennale, Electra Paris,Ars Electronica,V2 Institute for the Unstable Media, Milan Triennale, Biennale do Mercosul, Brazil, European Media Festival, and gr2000az atGraz, Austria. His first telematic project wasLa Plissure du Texte (1983),[17] 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 theArs Electronica Festival in Linz, discussed by (inter alia) Matthew Wilson Smith inThe Total Work of Art: from Bayreuth to Cyberspace, New York: Routledge, 2007.
Retrospective exhibitions of his work were shown in May 2009 at Plymouth Arts Centre, England, then in the Incheon International Digital Arts Festival inIncheon, South Korea in September 2010, and atSPACE (studios) inHackney, London in 2011.Syncretic Cybernetics, a comprehensive exhibition of his work, was featured in the 9thShanghai Biennale 2012.Roy Ascott: The Analogues (featuring his work of the 1960s) was shown at the Plug-in Institute of Contemporary Arts,[18] Winnipeg, July–Sept 2013. In September 2014, a mini retrospective of his work was shown in Linz, at the time of his Ars Electronica Golden Nica award.[19] He discussed his work on Geran TV.[20]
The seminal work of 1962, "Video-Roget"[21] was acquired in 2014, by the Tate Gallery, London for its permanent collection. Two key works were included in "Electronic Superhighway", at the Whitechapel Gallery, London in 2016.[22] "Art in Europe 1945–68" shown inZKM,Karlsruhe, Germany Oct 2016/ Jan 2017, included his "Change-painting 1966".[23] His early work was the subject of the exhibition "Roy Ascott: Form has Behaviour", at theHenry Moore Institute,Leeds, Jan/Apr 2017.[24]
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