Robert Appleton was an art director at Saatchi & Saatchi, a percussion student with Tony Oxley, a fine art and photography student at St Martin's School of Art and a photojournalist for BBC Television before he emigrated to the USA from Scotland in 1979, and became an early adopter of the personal computer. His work with musicians Ornette Coleman, John Cage, and others, his International Women of Hope posters and his vorTEXT (visual+aural+textual) a new multimodal language of the senses, have won international acclaim. His work is held in the permanent collections of The Library of Congress, The Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Mimar Sinan University and the Vignelli Centre for Design Studies at RIT. He taught at Cooper Union and Parsons School of Design in New York, CAFA and Glasgow School of Art in Beijing, Toronto Metropolitan University and OCADU in Toronto, where he earned his MFA in Interdisciplinary Art Media and Design in 2010. He helped form 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 this internationally.