The agent of psychic forces: interview to Roy Ascott

August 13, 2009 11:09 am

I met Roy Ascott in Plymouth fifteen days ago, visiting the Planetary Collegium, an advanced research center which he set up in 2003 at the University and where he is Professor of Technoetic Arts.

In May I visited the first retrospective dedicated to the pioneering cybernetic artist, curated in collaboration with i-DAT (Institute for Digital Art and Technology, University of Plymouth) has come to a close at the Plymouth Arts Centre.
The exhibition explored the influences and rhetoric of Roy Ascott’s work, mapping the impact, history and development of technology and looking to the future of Web2 and Second life. Roy Ascott sees telematic art as the transformation of the viewer into an active participant in creating artwork, which remains in process throughout its duration.

Significantly, the content of his projects were often spiritual: staging the first planetary casting of the I Ching with an early form of the Net in 1982, whilst his major installation at the Ars Electronica centre in 1989 explored Gaia theory.
In all the biographies and articles I have read about him, Roy Ascott is rightly defined as a man who “brought together the science of cybernetics with elements of Dada, Surrealism, Fluxus and Pop Art.”
I think that looking retrospectively at his work, Ascott was more than a pioneer, more than an artist. He was the founder who invented an artistic language that didn’t have a name before he gave it one: telematic art. (A combination of computers and telecommunication, designed as interactive collaboration with the web, long before the artistic use of the Internet; see net.art, new media art, crowdsourcing art) .
Much more than a pioneer, much more than an inventor, he was, above all, a theorist –all definitions that go hand in hand with each other, laying the foundations of the techno-artistic world.

Ascott worked to overcome the boundaries of cultural/conceptual and aesthetic frame, dedicating himself to theoretical activities that projected him as an artist-creator of a world first conceived and named by him.

Indeed Roy Ascott didn’t need the Internet or e-mail to give shape to the plains, mountains and seas of his digital creativity. He just simply turned on his computer and connected it to the first network of the early Sixties, creating an artistic language from all his activities.

Who would have thought of it? This was the stuff of engineers and armies! Ascott immediately understood that the web was a tool of transformation, an alchemical, somatic or pharmaceutical medium to develop access to consciousness.

As the concept of telepresence came and went with the birth of the Internet and the personal computer, his theoretical work broadened, becoming a wonderful inspiration for us all: from syncretic research to technoetics and moistmedia.

Here an interview to him in which he explains many things and the socialnetwork phenomena in a new way.

Simona Lodi: You are always described as a pioneer, but I think you are much more than that. What conceptual assumptions lie behind your work? Is it a sort of techno-determinism or the response of an artist to the information technology revolution and the digitalisation of culture?

Roy Ascott: My underlying  conceptual assumptions predate “the information technology revolution and the digitalisation of culture”.  The world that led to my ideas of interaction, transformation, and transcendence grew from my dissertation on Paul Cezanne and the Expression of Change, the Tarot and I Ching, Pollock, Duchamp, Zen and the  primacy of gesture, the occult and esoteric more generally, alongside an early passion for the cybernetics of Ross Ashby, Norbert Wiener and my friend Gordon Pask. Hence my early change-paintings and other participatory analogue structures, especially the transactional table-top work. It’s all about interface and connectivity. I have always assumed that consciousness is a field for which we can develop tools of access. Oddly enough, my exposure to the operational and technological aspects of radar fighter control (I had a National Service commission) gave colour to the term ’screen of operations’. Telematic art avant la lettre!!
So, my conceptual assumptions have nothing much to do with technology in the raw. I like my technologies to be as near to invisible as possible. For me, it’s all about tools for transformation, whether they are alchemical, somatic, digital , or  pharmaceutical. Chance and change, connectivity, sacred spaces, networked, extended senses (what I once called ‘psibernetics’), these constitute (some of) the rubrics of motivation for me.

S.L.: You have contributed much to changing art, redefining its aesthetics and its purpose in today’s society. What role do you think the artist has today? Looking at yourself, where does the artist end in you and the researcher begin?

R.A.: Art and research: the quest is spiritual, the attempt to penetrate consciousness more deeply, to flow with the Tao. But it’s also  an endless urge to speculate, to try to think things into being. The specificity of technology is secondary: that’s why I am as interested in ayahuasca as I am in telematics.  A kind of moistmedia organicism is what I endorse; dry digitalisation alone is deadly.  I’m more syncretic than Socratic in my thinking. On the global level, more interested in the connectivity of minds, than the proximity of bodies; on the personal level, love, light and the extension of the senses.
I speculate therefore I am. Our role is to maintain  art as the agent of change and transformation. We think ourselves into being.  ‘Artist’ is the tag that confers freedom, the right to live out of the box, to transgress  orthodoxies of thought and being.  Art always tries to go beyond itself; the artist as supersensory self.
Art and research: it’s a continuum. In fact, these terms are, in the best sense, interchangeable when they are informed by rigorous creativity! We have to avoid at all costs the inappropriate, deadening effect on art research of the tunnel vision methodologies of Humanities research (linking the two together, as in AHRC, betrays a total misunderstanding of art practice), as well as the blind ‘rationality’ and materialist fundamentalism of institutional science (e.g. how quantum scientists deny the ontological implications of their craft).

Grey Skies research is having a disastrous effect on creativity. Art research must be blue-sky, speculative, anticipatory, and visionary.  It involves thinking out of the box, seeking to move the mind, the senses, and the arena of action beyond the initial frame of inquiry. Art research must produce its own protocols; the artist as researcher must engage with knowledge in new ways, creating new language, new frames of reference, new systems and behaviour. Art research must be non-linear, associative, risky, connective, transformative as well as intellectually, aesthetically  and even spiritually challenging. If only industry and business could understand that! Then we’d really get the ‘enterprise culture’ that institutions so desperately seek.

S.L.: How do you manage to invent so many neologisms and new concepts? You haven’t stopped since the Sixties, with words such as “telematics”, “global consciousness”, “distributed authorship”, “cybernation”, “syncretic art”, “technoetics”, and “moistmedia”.

R.A.: Does anyone actually know how ideas arise, or where they come from?  We know little of the mind’s constitution (it’s not an epiphenomenon of the brain, I’m sure of that). Consciousness is the ultimate mystery, the final frontier.  The artist’s role is to navigate it.  I often feel like the agent of psychic forces.

In the search for new forms of behaviour and in trying to access the inner recesses of consciousness, I find that new language is needed, partly in explanation and partly to galvanise action in others. As we move out of the old order we shall develop new language behaviour, just as in, at a simple level, texting, and the use of the thumb. In short, new behaviours demand new language, new language generates new behaviours.

S.L.: These are all concepts that have inspired many artistic initiatives (including our own Action Sharing project). What brought you to formulating these theories and the projects you have put together (from Terminal Art to La plissure du Text)?

R.A.: The need to be distributed, to be present simultaneously in many places at different times. The asynchronic state of being is addictive. It’s the need to live many lives, to create many selves. I share the impulse of the Portuguese writer Fernando  Pessoa , who, through his creation of heteronyms, affirmed his belief that a man cannot possibly live and fully understand life by being only one person, but that you must lead simultaneous lives to achieve this higher understanding.

S.L.: You are also known to be an omnivorous thinker and experimenter. What common thread can be found between cybernetics and Michel Duchamp, the I Ching and shamanism in Brazil?

R.A.: I’d nominate change, transformation, non-linearity, connectivity,  associative thought, aperspectival perception, ability to create/move through a variable reality. But . . .it’s the weaving of discontinuities, not the commonality of the thread that I favour. That’s why I advocate syncretism in all diversity.

S.L.: What do you predict for the future? What prospects do you see?

R.A.: The mind is outgrowing the body, and its ability to manage identity is becoming less socially constrained. We shall be increasingly concerned, not simply with our own individual personal (re)creation (think Nietzsche!), but with the creation of multiple selves. We are no longer effectively a single-self organism. Early evidence of this can be found in Second Life and other multiverse scenarios, as well as in the social networking community. Computers and Architecture will learn to see, feel and anticipate; both interfaces and places will evolve emotional sensibilities and the capacity to think. We shall move seamlessly through material and virtual fields, recognising that we can build reality as we go.

The body will host our moist technology of communication (e.g. the idea of handheld tools will become quite foreign). As in the early Middle Ages, we shall increasingly turn to syncretism to resolve the geo-political, religious and civil disputes, such as those currently plaguing us. The importance to this process of  the syncretic impulse in art should not be underestimated. However syncretism calls for participant communities of thought that reject orthodoxy and celebrate change. Consequently art education will reform or perish. The same for universities: only their radical reform into  dynamic  organisms of transdisciplinary learning and inquiry will save them.

SL.: Thanks, Roy.

Simona Lodi

Special thanks to  Gianni Corino , professor at the University of Plymouth and member of supervisory team i-DAT Center.