Roy Ascott

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Roy Ascott
Roy Ascott 2012.jpg
Ascott in 2012
Born
Roy Ascott

26 October 1934 (1934-10-26) (age 89)
Bath, Somerset, England
NationalityEnglish
EducationKing's College, University of Durham (now Newcastle University)
Known forart, technoetics, syncretism
Notable workLa Plissure du Texte, Electra, Paris; Planetary Network, XLII Venice 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
AwardsDoctor Honoris Causa, Ionian University, Corfu, Greece. Honorary Professor, Aalborg University. Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts London. Prix Ars Electronica Golden Nica Award for Visionary Pioneers of Media Art 2014.

Roy Ascott FRSA (born 26 October 1934) is a British artist, who works with cybernetics and telematics on an art he calls technoetics by focusing on the impact of digital and telecommunications networks on consciousness. Since the 1960s, Ascott has been a practitioner of interactive computer art, electronic art, cybernetic art and telematic art.

Contents

Ascott exhibits internationally (including the Biennales of Venice and Shanghai), and is collected by Tate Britain and Arts Council England. He is recognised by Ars 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 the Planetary Collegium. In 2018, he became the subject of Cybernetics & 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]

He is President of the Planetary Collegium, Professor of Technoetic Arts Plymouth University, and the De Tao Master of Technoetic Arts at the DeTao Masters Academy in Shanghai. [1] He is also Chief Specialist of the Visual Art Innovation Institute at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing. [1] He is the founding editor of the research journal Technoetic Arts, an honorary editor of Leonardo Journal , and author of the book Telematic Embrace: Visionary Theories of Art, Technology and Consciousness, University of California Press. [1]

Biography

Roy Ascott was born in Bath, England. He was educated at the City of Bath Boys' School. His National Service was spent as a Pilot Officer in RAF Fighter Command working with radar defence systems. [4] From 1955 to 1959, 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. [4] He was awarded the degree of B.A. Hons Fine Art, Dunelm in 1959. [4] On graduation he was appointed Studio Demonstrator (1959–61). He then moved to London, where he established the radical Groundcourse at Ealing Art College, which he subsequently established at Ipswich Civic College, in Suffolk, working with artist tutors such as Anthony Benjamin, Bernard Cohen. [4] R. B. Kitaj, Brian Wall, Harold Cohen, and Peter Startup. Important to the development of his understanding of cybernetics was his friendship with Gordon Pask. Notable alumni of the Groundcourse include Brian Eno, Pete Townshend, Stephen Willats, and Michael English. [4]

Ascott taught in London Ealing, [5] and was a visiting lecturer at other London art schools throughout the 1960s. [5] He was then briefly was President of Ontario College of Art, now OCAD University, [6] Toronto and then Chair of Fine Art at Minneapolis College of Art and Design before moving 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, [7] during the 1980s, and Professor of Technoetic Arts at the University of Wales, Newport in the 1990s where he established the Centre for Advanced Inquiry in the Interactive Arts. He established the Planetary Collegium in 2003. [7]

Ascott is recipient of the Prix 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 Doctor Honoris Causa of Ionian University, Corfu, Greece; Honorary Professor at Aalborg University Copenhagen; Honorary Professor at University of West London. [5]

Education and research

He has advised new media arts organisations in Brazil, Japan, Korea, Europe and North America as well as UNESCO, and was Visiting Professor (VI), Design Media Arts, University of California Los Angeles (2003–07) [8] at the UCLA School of the Arts. Ascott was an International Commissioner for the XLII Venice Biennale of 1986 (Planetary Network and Laboratorio Ubiqua [9] ).

Planetary Collegium

He is the founding president of the Planetary Collegium an advanced research center which he launched in 1994, with its Hub currently based in the University 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), [10] 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 the Shanghai Institute of Visual Art. The DeTao-Node of the Planetary Collegium was established in 2015. He is a Doctor Honoris Causa of Ionian University, Corfu, Greece. [1]

Art

In his first show in 1964 at the Molton Gallery, London, [11] he exhibited Analogue Structures and Diagram Boxes, comprising aleatory chance operation paintings and other chance operation 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) [11] and in 1972, he became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. [1]

Interactive computer art

Since the 1960s, Ascott has been working with interactive computer art, telematic art, [12] and systems art. 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. [13] [14] He was also influenced by the writings of Gordon Pask, Stafford Beer, William Ross Ashby, and F.H. George. [15]

International exhibitions

Ascott has shown at the Venice Biennale, Shanghai Biennale, Electra Paris, Ars Electronica, V2 Institute for the Unstable Media, Milan Triennale, Biennale do Mercosul, Brazil, European Media Festival, and gr2000az at Graz, Austria. His first telematic project was La Plissure du Texte (1983), [16] 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.

Retrospective exhibitions of his work were shown in May 2009 at Plymouth Arts Centre, England, then in the Incheon International Digital Arts Festival, Incheon, South Korea in September 2010, and at SPACE (studios) in Hackney, London in 2011. Syncretic Cybernetics, a comprehensive exhibition of his work, was featured in the 9th Shanghai Biennale 2012. Roy Ascott: The Analogues (featuring his work of the 1960s) was shown at the Plug-in Institute of Contemporary Arts, [17] 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. [18] He discussed his work on Geran TV. [19]

The seminal work of 1962, "Video-Roget" [20] 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. [21] "Art in Europe 1945–68" shown in ZKM, Karlsruhr, Germany Oct 2016/ Jan 2017, included his "Change-painting 1966". [22] His early work was the subject of the exhibition "Roy Ascott: Form has Behaviour", at the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds, Jan/Apr 2017. [23]

Books authored by Roy Ascott

Books edited by Roy Ascott

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Interactive art</span> Creative works that involve viewer input

Interactive art is a form of art that involves the spectator in a way that allows the art to achieve its purpose. Some interactive art installations achieve this by letting the observer walk through, over or around them; others ask the artist or the spectators to become part of the artwork in some way.

<i>The Pleasure of the Text</i> 1973 book by Roland Barthes

The Pleasure of the Text is a 1973 book by the French literary theorist Roland Barthes.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Electronic art</span> Art that uses or refers to electronic media

Electronic art is a form of art that makes use of electronic media. More broadly, it refers to technology and/or electronic media. It is related to information art, new media art, video art, digital art, interactive art, internet art, and electronic music. It is considered an outgrowth of conceptual art and systems art.

Information art, which is also known as informatism or data art, is an art form that is inspired by and principally incorporates data, computer science, information technology, artificial intelligence, and related data-driven fields. The information revolution has resulted in over-abundant data that are critical in a wide range of areas, from the Internet to healthcare systems. Related to conceptual art, electronic art and new media art, informatism considers this new technological, economical, and cultural paradigm shift, such that artworks may provide social commentaries, synthesize multiple disciplines, and develop new aesthetics. Realization of information art often take, although not necessarily, interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary approaches incorporating visual, audio, data analysis, performance, and others. Furthermore, physical and virtual installations involving informatism often provide human-computer interaction that generate artistic contents based on the processing of large amounts of data.

Kenneth E. Rinaldo is an American neo-conceptual artist and arts educator, known for his interactive robotics, 3D animation, and BioArt installations. His works include Autopoiesis (2000), and Augmented Fish Reality (2004), a fish-driven robot.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Planetary Collegium</span>

The Planetary Collegium is an international transcultural and transdisciplinary new media art educational research platform that promotes on the doctorate level the integration of art, science, technology, and consciousness research under the rubric of the technoetic arts. It is based in the School of Art, Design and Architecture department at Plymouth University in the United Kingdom with nodes in Trento, Lucerne and Shanghai. Since its inception in 1994, over 80 doctoral candidates have graduated from the Planetary Collegium with Plymouth University PhDs. The founding President is Professor Roy Ascott.

Telematic art is a descriptive of art projects using computer-mediated telecommunications networks as their medium. Telematic art challenges the traditional relationship between active viewing subjects and passive art objects by creating interactive, behavioural contexts for remote aesthetic encounters. Telematics was first coined by Simon Nora and Alain Minc in The Computerization of Society. Roy Ascott sees the telematic art form as the transformation of the viewer into an active participator of creating the artwork which remains in process throughout its duration. Ascott has been at the forefront of the theory and practice of telematic art since 1978 when he went online for the first time, organizing different collaborative online projects.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Francesco Monico</span>

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Systems art is art influenced by cybernetics and systems theory, reflecting on natural systems, social systems, and the social signs of the art world itself.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Edward A. Shanken</span> American art historian (born 1964)

Edward A. Shanken is an American art historian, whose work focuses on the entwinement of art, science and technology, with a focus on experimental new media art and visual culture. Shanken is Professor, Arts Division, at UC Santa Cruz. His scholarship has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies and has been translated into many languages. Shanken is the author of Art and Electronic Media, among other titles.

Technoetics is a neologism introduced by Roy Ascott, who coined the term from techne and noetic theory, to refer to the emergent field of technology and consciousness research.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hybrid art</span> Art that works with science and technology

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Internet art</span> Form of art distributed on the Internet

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Robert Adrian (1935–2015), also known as Robert Adrian X, was a Canadian artist who made radio and telecommunications art. Adrian moved from Canada to Vienna, Austria in 1972 where he became known for creating experimental artworks using radio and communications technologies. His work The World in 24 Hours, which connected artists in different cities and continents through telephone lines and radio, is considered to be one of the first experiments in online culture. Adrian is considered to be a pioneer in the field of telecommunications art and media art.

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Cybernetic art</span> Contemporary art form

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A vidéothèque is a virtual or physical library of videos. The concept originated as installations in museums or art galleries, but has been extended to video libraries on websites and physical fixed libraries and mobile libraries. Noted examples include those at ARTCENA, fr:Centre national du théâtre, Paris, Minpaku, Osaka and Ars Electronica in Linz

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 "Roy Ascott Studio". royascottstudio.com. Retrieved 23 August 2023.
  2. "Cybernetics & Human Knowing A Journal of Second Order Cybernetics, Autopoiesis & Cybersemiotics - A Tribute to the Messenger Shaman: Roy Ascott, Volume 25". 2018.
  3. "Art, Cybernetics and Pedagogy in Post-War Britain: Roy Ascott's Groundcourse". CRC Press. 2019.
  4. 1 2 3 4 5 "Technology and Intuition: Roy Ascott". leonardo.info. 10 March 1997.
  5. 1 2 3 "Routes Toward British Computer Arts: Educational Institutions, Page 57, Summer 2004, Bulletin of the Computer Arts Society" (PDF). Computer Arts Society. 2004.
  6. Wolfe, Morris (2002). OCA 1967–1972: Five Turbulent Years ISBN 0-9689737-0-1. Toronto: Grubstreet Books.
  7. 1 2 "New Media M.A. Research Blog – Media Studies". University of Amsterdam. 2006.
  8. "UCLA Design Media Arts / Calendar". dma.ucla.edu. 2007.
  9. "Planetary Network - Venice Biennale 1986". alien.mur.at. 1986.
  10. Index detaoma.net [ dead link ]
  11. 1 2 "telematic connections:: timeline". telematic.walkerart.org. 1964.
  12. "Art Museum Timeline". artmuseum.net.
  13. Randall, Randall; Jordan, Ken (2002). "Roy Ascott: Behaviourist Art and the Cybernetic Vision" (PDF). Department of Computer Science at Colby. New York, London: W. W. Norton & Company. pp. 104–120. Retrieved 6 March 2024.
  14. "Plymouth Arts Cinema". Plymouth Arts Cinema | Independent Cinema for Everyone | located at Arts University Plymouth. Retrieved 25 August 2023.
  15. 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: Visionary Theories of Art, Technology and Consciousness. (ed. Edward A. Shanken). Berkeley: University of California Press.
  16. "telematic connections:: timeline". telematic.walkerart.org.
  17. "Roy Ascott: The Analogues | Plug In ICA". www.plugin.org. Archived from the original on 3 May 2013.
  18. "Roy Ascott (recording)". www.art-in-berlin.de.
  19. "video play tv". www.art-in-tv.de.
  20. "'Video-Roget', Roy Ascott, 1962". Tate.
  21. "Press Release - Electronic Superhighway" . Retrieved 25 August 2023.
  22. "Art in Europe 1945–1968 | 22.10.2016 (All day) to 29.01.2017 (All day) | ZKM". zkm.de.
  23. Foundation, Henry Moore. "Roy Ascott: Form has Behaviour". Henry Moore Foundation.