Roy Ascott was born in Bath, England. He had his first London exhibition in 1964, and published "Behaviourist Art and the Cybernetic Vision" in " Cybernetica: journal of the International Association for Cybernetics" that year. His most recent exhibition "Syncretic Cybernetics" is part of the 9th Shanghai Biennale (10/12-3/13). His early work was analogue, calling for the viewer's physical interaction. Whilst Dean of the San Francisco Art Institute he was introduced to developments in computer conferencing which led to his first telematic project, the NEA-funded 'Terminal Art -USA/UK', in 1980. He went on to create 'La Plissure du Texte: a planetary fairytale' (an online work of 'distributed authorship') for 'Electra' at the Museum of Modern Art in Paris (1983); and 'Aspects of Gaia: Digital Pathways across the Whole Earth' for Ars Electronica in Linz in 1989. Many online and installation projects followed at, for example, V2 Institute for the Unstable Media, Holland; Milan Triennale; Biennale do Mercosul, Porto Alegre, Brazil; European Media Festival, Osnabruck; and Planetary Network for the XLII Venice Biennale of 1986, where he was also an International Commissioner for the 'Laboratorio Ubiqua'. Cybernetics informed his radical Groundcourse at the Ealing And Ipswich Schools of Art in the early 1960's, and his restructuring of OCAD Toronto in the early 1970s. Currently, Ascott is Professor of Technoetic Arts, University of Plymouth, England and president of the Planetary Collegium, a international research network with nodes in Milan and Zurich. He was formerly, University of Wales Professor of Interactive Art; Vice-President of San Francisco Art Institute, California; Professor of Communications Theory, University of Applied Arts, Vienna; Professor of Fine Art, Minneapolis College of Art and Design. He has served on the Art and Media Panel of the Arts and Humanities Research Council, and the Arts Council 0f England. He is an Honorary Professor, Thames Valley University, London. He is the editor of Technoetic Arts, and on editorial boards of Leonardo, LEA, and Digital Creativity. He has advised new media centres in Europe, Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, Japan, Korea and the USA, as well as the CEC and UNESCO. He convenes the annual international Consciousness Reframed conferences. His books include: Telematic Embrace: Visionary Theories of Art Technology and Consciousness. Edited by Edward A. Shanken. University of California Press, 2003; Engineering Nature, Intellect, 2006; Technoetic Arts (Korean translation: YI, Won-Kon, Ed.), Yonsei University Press, 2002. Reframing Consciousness, Intellect, 1999.; Art & Telematics: toward the Construction of New Aesthetics. (Japanese translation: E. Fujihara, Ed.). NTT, Tokyo 1998. He has authored over 150 papers and articles, widely translated in many languages. A comprehensive retrospective of his work was shown in 2009 at the Plymouth Arts Centre (UK) www.plymouthartscentre.org/art/royascott.html, again in 2010 in Seoul, South Korea, and then in SPACE studios in Hackney, London 2011.