It was twenty years ago, here at Ars Electronica, that I first met Roy Ascott. By that time, Roy already had a significant history with the festival. His telematic artwork Ten Wings, which was part of Robert Adrian’s Golden Nica award-winning global telecommunications art project The World in 24 Hours (1982), consisted of a planetary throwing of the I Ching. The resulting hexagram was “Chun” (difficulty at the beginning), a reading that also prophecies that “if one perseveres there is the prospect of great success” [I Ching 1950, 16] Indeed, we are all here to honor Roy’s great success as a visionary pioneer of media art. Roy won a Golden Nica in 1993 for his telematic artwork, Aspects of Gaia. Inspired by James Lovelock’s notion of the Earth as a living organism, this artwork incorporated contributions of images and texts from around the world and provided a highly embodied, physical encounter with these ideas. Roy was commissioned to write a proposal for the Ars Electronica Center, which he conceived of as a Datapool, in 1993. In 1996, the Televator (part of that proposal) was permanently installated in the AEC. ...