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

Ascott exhibits internationally (including the Biennales of Venice and Shanghai), and is collected by Tate Britain and Arts Council England.

[2] Dr.Kate Sloan's comprehensive study of his early work "Art Cybernetics and Pedagogy in Post-War Britain: Roy Ascott's Groundcourse" was published by Routledge in 2019.

[8] Ascott is recipient of the Prix Ars Electronica Golden Nica award for Visionary Pioneer of Media Art 2014.

He is the founding president of the Planetary Collegium an advanced research center which he launched in 1994, with its Hub currently based in the University of Plymouth, UK, and nodes in China, Greece, Italy, and Switzerland.

In March 2012 he was appointed De Tao Master of Technoetic Arts at (DTMA),[11] a high-level, multi-disciplined, creativity-oriented higher education institution in Shanghai, China.

In 1968, he was elected Associate Member of the Institution of Computer Science, London (proposed by Gordon Pask)[12] and in 1972, he became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.

Ascott built a theoretical framework for approaching interactive artworks, which brought together certain characteristics of Dada, Surrealism, Fluxus, Happenings, and Pop Art with the science of cybernetics.

His first telematic project was La Plissure du Texte (1983),[17] an online work of "distributed authorship" involving artists around the world.

The second was his "gesamtdatenwerk" Aspects of Gaia: Digital Pathways across the Whole Earth (1989), an installation for the Ars Electronica Festival in Linz, discussed by (inter alia) Matthew Wilson Smith in The Total Work of Art: from Bayreuth to Cyberspace, New York: Routledge, 2007.

[23] His early work was the subject of the exhibition "Roy Ascott: Form has Behaviour", at the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds, Jan/Apr 2017.