GIVE AND TAKE

THE PIONEERING British media artist ROY ASCOTT, who turned ninety last fall, has been at the forefront of creative experimentation with interactivity since the late 1950s. Equally influential is his work as an educator, beginning with the radical “Groundcourse” he developed at the Ealing School of Art in 1961. In this conversation with curator HANS ULRICH OBRIST, artistic director of the Serpentine Galleries in London, Ascott reflects on his career and on his works’ renewed relevance amid current debates around AI and the effects of technology on art and society. 

HANS ULRICH OBRIST: You’ve inspired so many people through your teaching, both in the UK and at the San Francisco Art Institute in the ’70s. Brian Eno, who you taught at Ipswich College of Art, told me the amazing thing was that people went into all kinds of disciplines, not just art, once they’d been taught by you. There would be people who went into engineering, people like him who went into music, people who went into politics, people who went into art. You must have some kind of secret, and I’m curious to know what it is. 

ROY ASCOTT: I was Victor Pasmore’s favorite student at King’s College in Newcastle, so he got me this job to set up a two-year introductory course at Ealing School of Art, called the Groundcourse. In the stacks of the university library, I came across some remarkable books dealing with cybernetics—not Norbert Wiener, but biological cybernetics and things like that. And I developed a way of teaching that always looked at identity and behavior and environment. So one of the various attack modes that I would use to get into the minds of these young students and help them to become more expressive and creative was to get them to design and build these devices we called calibrators, which could be carried either on the wrist or on the clothing, or built as a structure. They were intended to allow students to act out different personalities by generating behavioral responses to different kinds of inputs: The point was to have input about identity, about a place and situation, and then to be able to say, “As the location changes, identity changes, behavior changes,” and so on and so on. 

HUO: And the idea of cybernetics and these feedback loops, to what extent was that important for your artwork? I’m thinking of your “Change Paintings” [1959–61], which allowed viewers to rearrange a series of overlapping painted Plexiglas panels to create a new composition. What triggered the epiphany that led you to the “Change Paintings”? You started engaging with cybernetics from 1961 onward, but was it already there somehow? 

RA: The “Change Paintings” came earlier than that. I graduated art school in 1959. And then for two years I was an assistant to Victor Pasmore at the university, and during that time I was very interested in Japanese calligraphy. I did some rolls of lining paper with all these things on them. And then I thought, “Well, if I put each of these gestures on separate, transparent sheets of glass, you could endlessly alternate them, and the viewer becomes part of the work.” 

HUO: In 1964 you published an essay, “The Construction of Change,” in which you somehow seem to have integrated all these different elements and aspects: your artwork, your interest in cybernetics, and your teaching. In his introduction to a book of your collected writings, Telematic Embrace: Visionary Theories of Art, Technology, and Consciousness [2003], Edward Shanken writes that you came to see both artworks and the classroom as “creative systems, the behavior of which could be altered and regulated by interactive exchange via the feedback loops.” Can you talk about some examples of these early systems?

There should be give and take. The idea that the artist just pushes out and you receive was less interesting than the systems in which the receiver could also be the producer.

RA: The classroom is very much a system. The whole way it operated was with students taking on change. The centerpiece, really, was the building of the calibrators, which each student did as part of the Groundcourse. Now they could be computerized systems, but it couldn’t be that sophisticated in those days in Ealing: They were analog devices then, ranging from handheld to whole environmental structures. And the students were never just themselves. They engaged in constructing things together as new kinds of organisms: four, five, six people, designing, say, a three-dimensional game, and these six people would engage with it together as a new kind of creative mind. They’d also be aware of changes in their environment. Hence you had the Who’s Pete Townshend as a student, shooting down a corridor of the art school on a trolley because he wasn’t allowed to use his legs. But it was basically about the interaction between identity, behavior, and environment. And that informed the whole way the work developed.

HUO: One thing I’m also curious about is your time at the San Francisco Art Institute, which you ran in the ’70s. I found in their archives quite interesting documents in which you wrote your manifesto as the dean. You write, “The San Francisco Art Institute, for more than a hundred years, has served as a focal point of art at its source. A visual art institution serving the dual purpose of a higher education in the fine arts and the exhibition of contemporary fine art work.” The idea that it would be both a school and an exhibition space reminded me of the Städelschule in Frankfurt, where I worked early on in my career. What are your memories of SFAI? Was it a good time?

RA: I’m afraid they’re not very happy. I was teaching at the time at Minneapolis College of Art and Design. I must say it was a rather cold climate. And then one day this beautiful poster arrived in the mail. And we opened it up, and it was of the most glorious flowers on a hillside, from the San Francisco Art Institute, and an invitation to interview for the dean of fine art and assistant president there. I got the job. But the man who was the newly appointed president, Arnold Herstand, was, I hate to say it, a fool. He went to the press as the new president of the San Francisco Art Institute and said he was going to clean it up. For example, the numbers on the doors were not uniform—he had this unbelievable kind of wretched thing about how it was going to have better lettering on the doors. Very un–San Francisco Art Institute! He was utterly hated. We had a formal meeting, with everybody from the Bay Area, all the painters, all the students, in this huge auditorium, where I was introduced as the new dean. It was filmic almost—he was screamed out of the building. He never came back in the building again. So he left me there as now the acting president in front of all these people. And some guy at the very top said, “I know you, Ascott. I know all your fucking ‘Change Paintings,’” and all this, in such a way that made me very, very angry. So I kind of lost it and stormed up these steps to this bloke and just punched him in the nose. And there was blood. [Laughter.] The whole place erupted. Then Ray Mondini and some other people came in and shook my hand or hugged me. One guy kissed me and said, “Man! . . .”—all this sort of stuff. [Laughter.] 

HUO: But the text you wrote is very beautiful. You talk about the “growth of the artist as a lifelong process.” You also wanted it to be open twenty-four hours a day.

RA: Exactly, yes. I thought for a metropolitan place like that, it should be. And we would see new kinds of art emerging from that kind of situation. 

HUO: And it’s interesting—you also wrote, “Our history of innovation and artistic fecundity is well established, but in espousing artistic and intellectual freedom we are not without a structure calling for disciplined study and practice. The framework for this study is based on concerns. And then comes the necessity for stimulation, variety, and reciprocity. There is no house style here. We seek a full range of artistic attitudes in our richly varied faculty, a reciprocal relationship.” This idea of reciprocity and variety in a school is so fascinating. 

RA: There should be give and take. The idea that the artist just pushes out and you receive was less interesting than the systems in which the receiver could also be the producer. There would be a reciprocity between the two, within this context of something creative emerging. And this interactivity was endemic to that. So it was really trying to enlarge the field of creativity—making the observer less a passive viewer and more an active participant. 

***

HUO: One thing that is notable about your work is that it seems you already foresaw the impact of computer communications on every aspect of our lives in the ’60s, well before Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web in 1989. 

RA: Oh, yes. I did some early projects before the World Wide Web. In early 1983, I was invited to propose a work for the 1983 exhibition “Electra: Electricity and Electronics in the Art of the Twentieth Century,” organized by Frank Popper for the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. My proposal, La plissure du texte, was a collective global fairy tale, with characters interacting through the ARTEX network, a pre-Web internet used by artists for the creation of a worldwide distributed narrative. 

HUO: I read that you consider that your most radical piece. Can you talk about the epiphany of La plissure du texte?

RA: I identified a number of people I’d been working with through the computer, mostly in North America and in Europe, particularly in Holland. I got these people together, as it were, online, and then distributed the characters in a fairy tale, such that eleven locations in the network would represent one character, by whatever means. So in one location, they would develop a story from the point of view of the wicked witch, and then someone somewhere else would be the magician or some other fairy-tale character. And the story emerged in this way, with each group contributing to the narrative and posting updates electronically. So the story would develop over a period of five or six weeks. The work was publicly available in the Musee d’Art Moderne: You’d go to the exhibition and log on and see the story; there was also a printout of it. People would come by and see the story on the screen and sit down and talk with you and suggest, “Why don’t you have so-and-so do this and this?” And you’d say, “Oh, yes. It’s a good idea. Type that in.” [Laughter.] So it became quite socially interactive as well. I’m very proud of it. 

HUO: Another important piece is, of course, the 1989 selection for the festival Ars Electronica, Aspects of Gaia: Digital Pathways Across the Whole Earth. It’s kind of a Gesamtkunstwerk, a total work of art. 

RA: I wanted to explore—and this was very important to me at the time—these massive questions like, “What is the Earth? What are planets?” And then I thought, “Well, let’s go to various places.” I sent by fax—and where there was email, by email—invitations to quite remote communities here and there, in Africa, Japan, and all sorts of places. I asked: “What are the aspects of Gaia that are beautiful, important, or valuable to you?” and requested that they send a video or some slides in response. And then I had this idea of building a railway, a lot of tunnels all the way around the Brucknerhaus in Linz, where Ars Electronica was housed in those days, under the flower beds. Peter Weibel very kindly raised the money for me to get a kind of trolley thing and a rail set up and actually persuaded the Ars Electronica authorities to let us get away with this. So we built this tunnel all the way around, with various stops that people could look into. You got in and sat in the trolley, and it moved forward. At various points of this underground railway were big screens, from the ceiling down, with the videos and slides that had come in as an expression of “Aspects of Gaia.” And then upstairs in the exhibition were a couple of interactive displays that visitors could use to contribute, to do drawings or whatever you wanted to do within the context of Gaia. So the public could get engaged.

So the media could be moist, could be more than rigid screens and computers and all that sort of thing.

HUO: Later, you developed the idea of “moist media” in another text, the “Moist Manifesto” [2000]. What is moist media?

RA: I was interested in the idea that artists could be involved in more than simply electronic systems, that there are living systems in nature itself. That there can be interaction beyond the computer that can lead to creative work. How organic elements could exhibit the sort of behavior of storage and construction and so on that computers were valued for. So the media could be moist, could be more than the sort of rigid screens and computers and all that sort of thing. To open it all up. 

Now, as I’m approaching my ninetieth year, my interactive work is largely focused on my DeTao Technoetic Arts studio in the Shanghai Institute of Visual Arts. I define Technoetics as a field of practice that explores consciousness and connectivity through digital, telematic, chemical, and spiritual means, embracing both interactive and psychoactive technologies, and the creative use of moist media.

HUO: You’ve done so many things, but do you have any unrealized projects? We know a great deal about architects’ unrealized projects because they publish them all the time, but we rarely hear about artists’ unrealized projects. Are there things you dreamed about doing?

RA: I always wanted to see the implication of “Change Paintings” on an environmental level, even if it was simply at the level of sliding doors or something in public space. My dreams would have been sitting around with Will Alsop and thinking up architectural possibilities with him.

HUO: Did you do any architectural projects with Will?

RA: There was a very wealthy art collector who bought land in America, and his plan was to build lots of very expensive houses. The idea was that the people there, who would be at the top of their games, would be able to interact telematically in the fullest sense—not just with little handheld devices, but with a whole setup there. And Will was hired to design this enclave. He brought me on as the artist for it, as well as various other people. And then after about a year of meetings and all kinds of planning, this fellow, out of the blue, just pulled the plug. 

HUO: Finally, I’m curious about your take on AI. Your “Change Paintings” are really relevant now for a lot of artists, because there’s so much discussion about the idea of making an artwork as a living organism so that it’s always changing rather than a finite thing—particularly now with AI. You anticipated a lot of these ideas and concerns.

RA: AI will find its way in the world. Like interactivity, it will grow. I don’t see it as a threat, but I do see that it could be taken up in a superficial way by people who would like to be artists.