Roy Ascott
Roy Ascott has exhibited widely, from the Venice Biennale to Ars
Electronica. He is published in at least twelve languages, is active in five
continents, and recognised internationally as an innovator and visionary. He
is president of the Planetary Collegium at Plymouth; Honorary Professor of
Thames Valley University, London. Formerly: Adjunct Professor, University of
California Los Angeles; Vice-President, San Francisco Art Institute;
Professor of Communications Theory, University of Applied Arts, Vienna;
President, Ontario College of Art, Toronto. Advisor: new media centres in
Europe, Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, Japan, Korea and the USA, CEC and
UNESCO. He edits Technoetic Arts: a journal of speculative research
(Intellect). His publications include Telematic Embrace: visionary theories
of art, technology and consciousness. Berkeley: University of California
Press.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_Ascott
Blackboard Notes (1967)
special poster edition of 1000 produced by KURATOR (2009)
Blackboard Notes (1967) was the flip side of Diagram Boxes and Analogue
Structures (Catalogue, Molton Gallery exhibition, London 1963): two faces of
the same cybernetic coin. The issues addressed were chance and change, being
and behaviour, process and participation. It was about writing the future,
and auto-catalysing the present.
In both cases, I was looking for ways of mapping thoughts in writing that
would parallel the way I was mapping thoughts with visual structures in wood
and glass. My analogue artwork at that time was transformable through the
physical participation of the viewer (pre-visioning the promise of
cybernetics, only later to be realised with access to digital media). The
gestural space of the Notes and the formal connectivity of the Diagram were
employed to initiate a kind of semantic flow that purely linear writing or
fixed visual form could not accommodate. (Roy Ascott)
Lecture: Transiting the Net (2009)
Cybernetics and behaviour, mind and technology, connectivity and syncretism, constitute the parameters of practice of Roy Ascott, whose talk will chart his passage through the Net, from analogue to digital and beyond. His change-paintings and analogue structures of the early 1960s were based in cybernetic theory, as was his radical approach to teaching, notably at Ealing and the OCA in Toronto. Issues of identity, social organisation, consciousness, connectivity and technology have cohered in his vision. In 1970s California, he became involved in computer communications, initiating “telematic art”, that led to the generic La Plissure du Texte, a project of “distributed authorship”, for Electra, Paris in 1983. Interface innovation led to the seminal installation Aspects of Gaia, for Ars Electronica 1989. Over many years of visiting Brazil, his research has been, concerned with technoetic, spiritual practices, aligning “plant technology” with digital systems, chemistry with computer. His extensive writings have produced much cited neologisms, such as cyberception, moistmedia, telenoia, all pointing to new possibilities for art, linked to science, with developments in biophysics, quantum theory, or the nanofield for example. His current research focuses on the emergence of “the multiple self, in many locations, at many levels of consciousness. In our variable reality -- material, virtual, spiritual -- we experience, often simultaneously, our physical presence in ecospace, apparitional presence in spiritual space, telepresence in cyberspace, and vibrational presence in nanospace. As artists, we deal with media that are immaterial and moist, numinous and grounded, and with a technoetic mind that both inhabits the body and is telematically distributed across time and space. Where all these differences could be at odds with each other, we have a capacity to syncretise: to reconcile and analogise contradictions, melding differences. Syncretism will become both the subject and object of art in its evolving practice.”