Roy Ascott: The Analogues explores a small but crucial body of work by English inter-media artist and theorist Roy Ascott. The works in the exhibition were largely created in England between 1963 and 1970. They form a small but crucial part of the artist’s “Analogue” works – non-digital, two-dimensional and non-representational wall works that pre-figure his later artwork and theories relating to computer networks, viewer interaction, and telematics. Ascott was the first to coin the term “telematic art” to describe the use of online computer networks as an art medium.
These recently re-discovered works were exhibited for the first time in forty years. Exhibition curator Anthony Kiendl worked closely with a conservator to ensure the conservation of the works especially for the exhibition.
The Analogues were stored near Toronto since Ascott departed that city in 1972, after a brief and tempestuous tenure as the President of the then Ontario College of Art (now OCAD University). Hired in 1971 by OCA, Ascott was poised to overhaul the college’s programs. His forward-looking ideas anticipated later developments in art pedagogy, but polarized the community, precipitating his hasty departure.
Ascott emerged in the United Kingdom in the 1960s as an innovative artist and educator (a student of Victor Pasmore and Richard Hamilton). Ascott developed his radical art pedagogy in the form of the Groundcourse at art schools in London (Ealing) and Ipswich Civic College, Suffolk. His innovations helped foster a generation of artists, with former students including Stephen Willats, Brian Eno and Pete Townshend.
Ascott first went online in 1978, almost two decades before the Internet was popularly available. This encounter turned his attention from making art objects per se to organizing his first international artists’ computer-conferencing project, “Terminal Art,” in 1980.
The Analogues were created during the period between his initial contact with cybernetic theory and his first digitally-networked experiences online. Consequently, the Analogues form an indexical moment through which we may better understand Ascott’s impact on art, new media theory and education. As we can see in these works, Ascott anticipated the concept of “interactivity” in art, and his radical Groundcourse in art education positioned the importance of education in artistic practice, especially notable in relation to the educational turn in contemporary art.
Roy Ascott was born in 1934 in Bath, England. He has shown at the Venice Biennale, Milan Triennale, Biennale do Mercosul Brazil, European Media Festival, and Musée d’Art Moderne, Paris, among others. His retrospective The Syncretic Sense was shown at Plymouth Arts Centre UK, 2009; at the Incheon International Digital Art Festival, Korea, 2010, and at SPACE, Hackney, London, 2011. Roy Ascott: Syncretic Cybernetics was part of the Shanghai Biennale 2012. He is Founding President of the Planetary Collegium (World Universities Forum Award for Best Practice in Higher Education 2011), and the DeTao Master of Technoetic Arts at the Beijing DeTao Masters Academy in Shanghai; Honorary Professor of Aalborg University, Copenhagen, and University of West London.
Organized by Plug In ICA in partnership with Video Pool Media Art Centre, July 5 to September 27, 2013. Photos courtesy Plug In ICA.
