Robert Appleton was an art director at Saatchi & Saatchi, a percussion student with Tony Oxley, a fine art student at St Martins School of Art and a photojournalist for BBC Television before he emigrated to the USA from Scotland in 1979. He was an early adopter of the personal computer and his work with musicians Ornette Coleman, John Cage and others, his International Women of Hope posters and his performances with vorTEX (visual+aural+textual) multimedia language have won international acclaim (SF MoMA, Bibliothèque...). He taught at Cooper Union and Parsons School of Design in New York, CAFA and Glasgow School of Art in Beijing. He earned an MFA in Interdisciplinary Art Media and Design in 2010 and helped found the AGI Foundation at the Vignelli Centre for Design Studies in 2013. He has made improvised music and art since he was a child and remains fascinated by their relationship. He designs, creates live performance, and researches, writes and speaks about these internationally.