“In this technoetic culture, the art we produce is not simply a mirror of the world, nor is it an alibi for past events or present intensities. Engaging constructively with the technological environment, it sets creativity in motion, within the frame of indeterminacy, building new ideas, new forms, and new experience from the bottom up, with the artist relinquishing total control while fully immersed in the evolutive process. The viewer is complicit in this, interactively adding to the propositional force that the artwork carries. It is seduction in semantic space: Barthe’s juissance all over again.10 And it is a noetic enticement, an invitation to share in the consciousness of a new millennium, the triumphant seduction of technology by art, not the seduction of the artist by technology.”
Roy Ascott, Turning on Technology, (1997)
www.syncretica.net is an online semantic interpretation of The Syncretic Sense’ Roy Ascott Exhibition taking place at Plymouth Art Centre from the 4 April to the 24 May 2009. Syncretica.net aggregates archived content related to Ascott’s work allowing viewers to collaboratively create and manage tags that annotate and categorise this content. Feeding of web 2.0 sites such as Flickr and YouTube Syncretica.net creates a dynamic evolving folksonomy* of Ascott’s work.
*(also known as collaborative tagging, social classification, social indexing, and social tagging).
Syncretica is also accessible from the gallery space through an interactive table. Visitors can navigate the online content using the synctretica planchette.
As the folksonomy develops in its Internet-mediated environment, the semantic interpretation will grow and create links between content, people and tags. Part of the appeal of using a folksonomy is its inherent subversiveness that generates collective meanings and conceptual relationships. By following the trails and shadows of these links it is possible to move from one manifestation of an idea to another, ultimately providing the means for discovery, recombination, and creation of new ideas through a syncretic reconciliation or fusion of differing semantic systems of beliefs.
The Syncretic Sense
Roy Ascott
4 April 24 May 2009
The first UK retrospective exhibition of the pioneering cybernetic artist Roy Ascott, curated in collaboration with i-DAT (Institute for Digital Art and Technology, University of Plymouth).
http://www.plymouthartscentre.org/art/future.html
Long before email and the internet, Roy Ascott started using online computer networks as an art medium and coined the term telematic art. Since the 1960s he has been a pioneer of art, which brought together the science of cybernetics with elements of Dada, Surrealism, Fluxus and Pop Art. Parallel to his artwork, Roy Ascott is a highly acclaimed teacher and theorist of art pedagogy.
This exhibition explores 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 the 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 network in 1982; whilst his major installation at the Ars Electronica centre in 1989 explored Gaia theory.
The exhibition also looks back at the impact of Roy Ascott’s experimental years of art education. In the 1960s Roy Ascott was the head of Groundcourse at Ealing College of Art and developed one of the most influential and unorthodox approaches to teaching foundation studies in art. The basis of the course was developed around cybernetic theories of systems of communication: the flow of information, interactive exchange, feedback, participation and systemic relationship.
Roy Ascott studied under Victor Pasmore and Richard Hamilton at King’s College, Newcastle, University of Durham. His exhibitions include Venice Biennale, Ars Electronica Linz and Biennale do Mercosul, Brazil. He was President of the Ontario College of Art and Dean of San Francisco Art Institute. He is President of the Planetary Collegium, an international research network based in the University of Plymouth www.planetary-collegium.net
Press enquiries: Contact Hannah Prothero
Marketing & Communications Manager
Phone: 01752 276993
Email: hannah at plymouthartscentre dot org
Image: Roy Ascott, Plastic Transactions, 1970
A new series of projects and residencies that have been developed through an ongoing collaboration exploring new systems and technologies for artistic production, dissemination and participation that challenge traditional models of creation and consumption of art. Artists and Curator; Stanza (UK) 8 February - 6 April, Cadu (Brazil) 11 January - 11 March and Basak Senova (Turkey) 19 January - 9 February, will be residence spending time at both organisations exploring new work to create a series of new commissions and a seminar. i-DAT refer to the prominence of online social networks to create a series of creative interventions and works S-OS: Social Operating System for Plymouth in the galleries at Plymouth Arts Centre from the 8 February - 6 April.
http://www.plymouthac.org.uk
11 January - 11 March.
Cadu (Carlos Eduardo Felix da Costa) has been invited to undertake a three-month residency as part of an International Fellowship supported by the Arts Council of England. Cadu is an artist based in Brazil and will undertake this residency for the first time in the UK. This is an opportunity for this artist to define new ideas and processes in his work, by collaborating quite specifically with i-DAT the artist intends to work with the Robotics Research department at Plymouth University. This situation is a unique opportunity for the artists to explore advanced technologies and collaborate with engineers and scientist.
The International Fellowships Programme enables artists from all art forms and at any stage of their career to engage with artists and arts organisations from other cultures and disciplines. Selected artists are offered fellowships primarily for practice-based research, experimentation and the development of new work in relation to the artistic ethos of international hosts and the cultural contexts of the countries in which they are based.
8 February - 6 April. i-DAT, in collaboration with Plymouth Arts Centre, presents: ‘S-OS: a Social Operating System’ for the city of Plymouth. S-OS is a collection of creative interventions and strategic manifestations that provides a new and more meaningful ‘algorithm’ for modeling ‘Social Exchange’ and proposes a more effective ‘measure’ for ‘Quality of Life’. The S-OS project provides an Operating System for the social life of the City of Plymouth. It superimposes the notion of an ‘OnLine’ Social Operating System onto ‘RealLife’ human interactions, modeling, analyzing and making visible the social exchange within the City. http://www.s-os.org/
