Ascott, Professor Roy

Art and Mind

Roy Ascott is the founder and President of the Planetary Collegium, the Director of its CAiiA-Hub, and Professor of Technoetic Art in the University of Plymouth, England. He is Visiting Professor in Design|Media Arts at the University of California Los Angeles. Amongst many senior academic and advisory appointments he was Vice-President and Dean of the San Francisco Art Institute, California; Professor of Communications Theory, University of Applied Arts, Vienna, Austria; Professor and Chair of Fine Art, Minneapolis College of Art & Design; and President of Ontario College of Art , Toronto. In 1994, he founded CAiiA at the University of Wales Newport, which was renamed the Planetary Collegium when he relocated it at the University of Plymouth in 2003. Ascott was born in Bath, England, where he attended the City of Bath Grammar School. He spent his military service as a commissioned officer in the Fighter Control Branch of the Royal Air Force. He studied Fine Art at King's College, University of Durham (now University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne) under Victor Pasmore and Richard Hamilton, and Art History under Sir Lawrence Gowing and Quentin Bell. .His first appointment was in London at Ealing School of Art , where he established the radical Groundcourse, moving it later to Ipswich School of Art (recently revisited in the article "Degree Zero" by Emily Pethic, Frieze Magazine, Sept. 2007. pp.148/9). In London, he taught at the Slade School of Fine Art, University College; St. Martin's and the Central Schools of Art (now the University of the Arts). He was elected Associate of the Institution of Computer Sciences, London in 1968, and Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts in 1972. He has served on the Art and Media Panel of the Arts and Humanities Research Council, and the Arts Council of England.

Internationally recognised as the pioneer and seminal theorist of telematic art , Ascott has shown at the Venice Biennale, Electra Paris, Ars Electronica Linz, V2 Holland, Milan Triennale, Biennale do Mercosul, Brazil, European Media Festival, and has initiated many online projects, including the generic work of "distributed authorship", La Plissure du Texte (1983).His research is in art and the technology of consciousness. He is the founding editor of Technoetic Arts: a journal of speculative research (Intellect Books, UK), and he serves on the editorial boards of Leonardo. LEA, and Digital Creativity, and the Publication Committee of Interim, University of Tuiutim in Curitiba, Brazil. He has advised new media centres and festivals in many parts of Europe, Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, Japan, Korea and the USA, as well as the CEC and UNESCO, and convenes the annual international Consciousness Reframed conferences. He is a founding director of the European Environmental Tribunal, and serves on the International Advisory Boards of ISEA, the Art|Sci Center at UCLA, and the Database of Virtual Art. See selected comments on his work.

As director of research,Roy Ascott's PhD graduates include Peter Anders, Jon Bedworth, Geoff Cox, Char Davies, Elisa Giaccardi, Dew Harrison, Pamela Jennings, Eduardo Kac, Joseph Nechvatal, Miroslaw Rogala, Gretchen Schiller, Jill Scott, Bill Seaman, Christa Sommerer, Victoria Vesna. As a teacher, Ascott has had many notable students e.g. Brian Eno, Paul Sermon, Pete Townsend, Steve Willats.

His publications are translated into many languages and include the books:

Engineering Nature (2006) Telematic Embrace: Visionary Theories of Art Technology and Consciousness Technoetic Arts . (Korean trans. & ed. Won-Kon Yi). Yonsei: Yonsei University Press, 2002

Art Technology Consciousness (2000)

Reframing Consciousness (1999) Art & Telematics: toward the Construction of New Aesthetics. (Japanese trans. & ed. E. Fujihara). Tokyo: NTT Publishing.1998.

His first publications were: "Behaviourist Art and the Cybernetic Vision". In: Cybernetica: Journal of the International Association for Cybernetics, 1966/7, and "The Construction of Change" in Cambridge Opinion 1964.