Roy Ascott

Roy Ascott (born 26 October 1934) is a British artist, who works with cybernetics and telematics, on an art which is technoetic, focusing on the impact of digital and telecommunications networks on consciousness.

Quotes

• When art is a form of behaviour, software predominates over hardware in the creative sphere. Process replaces product in importance, just as system supersedes structure.
  • Behaviourables and Futuribles, manifesto, 1967; as cited in: Edward A. Shanken. "Cybernetics and Art: Cultural Convergence in the 1960s." 2002

• Recognition that art was located in an interactive system rather than residing in a material object... provid[ed] a discipline as central to an art of interactivity as anatomy and perspective had been to the renaissance vision.
  • “Interactive Art,” unpublished manuscript, 1994, p. 3; as cited in: Edward A. Shanken. "Cybernetics and Art: Cultural Convergence in the 1960s." 2002

Quotes about Roy Ascott

• Roy Ascott... aimed to achieve a wider 'cybernetic' awareness through acting on the psychology of the spectator, who was invited to regroup the elements of the technological universe and exploit certain of its meanings.
  • Frank Popper (1975). Art: Action and Participation, p. 11

• Ascott’s early vision of cybernetic art was founded on the concepts of process, behavior, and system.
  • Edward A. Shanken. "Cybernetics and Art: Cultural Convergence in the 1960s." 2002

• Roy Ascott was among the first artists to launch an appeal for total spectator participation: for him, the strict antinomy between action and contemplation needed to be abolished.
  • Frank Popper (2007). From Technological to Virtual Art.