Matthew Fuller And Simon Pope Matthew Fuller And Simon Pope

. Thank you.

Currently, they are doing a software installation commissioned by the architect Zaha Hadid for the Millennium Dome in Greenwich in London. Matthew Fuller is the editor of Fly Poster Frenzy, posters from the Anti-Copyright Network, and also a natural techno theory for a contaminated culture and co-editor of many other publications. Simon Pope's handbook is known as London Walking and will be published by Ellipsis this fall. His project, Ice Cream for Everyone, recently appeared at the Institute of Contemporary Art. He is a lecturer in the Business Informative Systems at the University of Wales Institute, Cardiff,

and producer and software developer for BBC Online. So please join me for a very warm welcome for these two special guests. Hi, I'm Matthew and that's the stooge, Simon. Basically what we're going to do is run through a series of short presentations of a variety of different projects. So Matthew's going to give an introduction to some of his theories of speculative software which have informed the practice of IOD Then I'll give a demonstration and some background of the IOD project

I'll be talking through the software that you can see here, the WebStalker Then I'll give you a very short piece of video that's been shot of the piece of work we've done for the Millennium Dome in London called Into the Web. Then I'll be handing back to Matthew, who will be showing you some work that he's done recently as research and as an exhibit, a piece called Word. Then you'll be handing back to me and I'll quickly go through a project that I've done called Ice Cream for Everyone and give you a little bit of information about the book that I have coming out in the fall. Okay. Okay, so basically what we're looking at is ways of bringing modes of production, modes of critique,

modes of analysis that have been applied in culture, specifically within art, to the practice of production of software. also looking at modes of, looking at the kinds of software, ways of understanding or using software that have been repressed in a sense by computer science and also by the position of software as a product within capitalist economics. So, and thirdly, we'll also be looking at ways of looking at and understanding other things, other kind of cultural processes derived from software.

For instance, the open source area or techniques of reverse engineering. Okay, so a lot of this will vary between material that we know very thoroughly So projects like the Webstalk which we've done And also work which is underway So we're not quite sure what we're talking about If it wobbles in between the two Then you'll hopefully believe that we might know what we're talking about Okay, so basically a lot of, we haven't been really given much context about what actually goes on here, but I presume this is related to a kind of digital arts area.

And a lot of our work comes out of a background in digital culture that doesn't sit quite comfortably in what's described as digital arts. A great deal of work by artists using digital technology seems to us to be lacking in curiosity about the materials it's worked with. So for digital art to mature and to kind of develop in a dialogue with wider currents of contemporary art and society, it must become functionally and not simply rhetorically reflexive and critical of the technologies that enable and contextualise it. but also the technologies, and these are the same, but which it's all too often seduced.

Technical innovation is a form of social invention and conflict. Too frequently within the terrain of digital media, the ace of innovation is hidden up the sleeve of a restrictive number of disciplines and proprietary interests. Software is a scientific culture of no culture, Yet its implicit and explicit structures provide the architectures of perception and production within which not only most artists working in digital media but apparently most work of all kinds in post-industrial sections of economies is now carried out. All software is the result of interpretive and productive operations on the entire realm of possible programming.

operations that stipulate what is desirable, what is necessary, what is profitable and what does not disturb the pre-existing settlement, what we know to be software or that which being technically fascinating or opportune perhaps encourages escape from it. So if software is the result of interpretive and productive operations on the realm of programming That is all possible software structures. It's also involved in putting into place ways of seeing, ways of knowing, and ways of doing. And in many ways that has fundamental parallels with histories of art.

So you can look at examples such as Las Meninas by Velázquez that instantiated very specific aesthetic technology that broke with a historically concrete way of looking at and understanding and sensing the world. And we see software very much as producing sensoriums through which the world is both known and produced. Also, a useful precedent for us has been performance scripts in performance art. For instance, Vito Conch's walk in the early 70s down a street holding a camera in front of him

with a simple set of instructions. Walk down a street with a camera in front of you. Every time you blink, take a photograph. A very simple program for a machine composed of a walker and a camera. Other precedents include, for instance, Onkawara's mail projects, which can be pretty much understood as parallels to pings on the internet. Okay, and within that, the other kind of context we operate in is the context of proprietary software. So, you know, Microsoft, for instance. And this is very much a context defined by very bloated, very excessive software.

So, for instance, within a standard Microsoft application, you'll find that 49% of software features are never used. 19% of software features in an average application are rarely used, and only 13% of features are used often, and 7% always. Okay, so there's this immense attempt to preempt the way users work, the way users think, and the way that software tries to attempt to subsume any potential use of that software.

But it's also a use determined by a very narrow band of possible behaviors, possible subjectivities within software. And you can see that expanding within, if we take the Windows operating system, Windows 3.1 had 3 million lines of code. By 1995, it had 14 million. By 1998, you're looking at 18 million lines of code in order to accommodate what was seen to be the uses that users would need to be made. Okay, so in terms of the culture of software,

There are a number of interventions, a number of currents, which we see as operating in parallel to interrogate and change what is seen as, what is understood, what is expected about software. First of all, a piece of work produced by a group, Mongol, in the UK, which I believe lets you to here at some point, the multimedia software Linker, which is designed specifically for use by community groups, by people who were not specifically catered for within conventional

multimedia software. And it's very much designed for very short, very fast production cycles of this group, which operates within community centers, operates within housing projects, and operates in a way with people who are locked outside of conventional computing culture to find a way that they could then produce soft artifacts that were of equal standard, of equal power to conventional multimedia. And so there's a current, which you might kind of identify as social software,

which is very much to do with finding social contexts and developing software that arises out of the needs of the people in those contexts instead of having a particular, maybe a kind of time and motion based understanding of what different work practices or different social needs demand. And just going in and just finding very simple ways, very small ways, of just articulating different kind of social needs. Secondly, you might identify another current speculative software,

which would include, say, the WebStalker and a piece of work by Mongol Natural Selection, which is a kind of hacked search engine. And this kind of current very much investigates what it means to be software, and it makes visible or interrogable the arrangements, gaps, spaces, and blocks between people, software, different kinds of data, different compositions of networks and machines. Thirdly, within this kind of... in defining different currents of software

which kind of evade the mainstream approaches and which are kind of focused on different cultural uses, there's much more obvious examples, such as the DCSS or Napster, Nutella, the Freenet system or Karan Show and Hotline, which basically allow different uses of the networks in very small, very tightly defined ways. It's find very particular jobs, very particular approaches to data, to sociability through networks, different ways of approaching commodities or information flows. and just find a very precise way of relating to them. Okay, so that kind of defines the terrain that we're working in to a certain extent.

So I'll switch to Simon to go through the web stalker. Well, first I'll give you a little bit of background on the project IOD. Is it not on? Oh, is it not on? Is there any volume there? Is that better? Yeah. Yeah? Okay. IOD is a collaboration between three artists, myself, Matthew, and a guy called Colin Green. We started, as Heather mentioned, in 1994. Our first publication was in 1994. We were working in a very, as it turns out, very traditional multimedia vein in those days.

We were inviting artists, writers, musicians to submit work to us. We had some editorial control over their work and we would interpret their work for a new medium. new medium. We would publish pieces of work on floppy disk. We would give away the floppy disks. Incidentally, just to correct the introduction that was given by Heather, we haven't sold software. We don't sell software. We would, by hook or by crook, we would get hold of production equipment. We would borrow time on people's machines. We would use downtime in the places that we were working in. We would

beg, reject floppy disks from floppy disk pressing plants. And we launched IOD1 in 1994 at the ICA in London. At the time, we were looking at contemporary work such as Jamie Levy's Electronic Hollywood. She's ended up working in New York I think now and worked with Billy Idol for a while here, worked with the music industry. But her most interesting work were, for us, the most interesting pieces were the the early works that were published on floppy disk and were very immediate and and had a sort of zine status. So we were publishing maybe one IOD per year for the first three years.

We were looking at the interface elements, the interaction and behaviours that were maybe rejected by traditional academic human-computer interface studies. For example, IOD 2 has no graphical user interface. You steer through it or navigate through it by touch and by sound. IOD 3 concerned itself with revealing the operating system and data structures to a user, the data structures in a personal computing environment. This took us up to, I think, 1996. And the industry that we were working in,

we worked and still work commercially in the software and new media environments. It was changing rapidly. There was a lot of money being made. The web boom had been and gone in the States and was just hitting in London. and we were wondering where to position ourselves as artists within that industry. Most of our peers were working for advertising agencies. They were working to resell youth culture to the masses through the web. And we didn't feel this was somewhere where we wanted to work. We didn't want our art practice to be pinned into the surface layer, the advertising, the branding gloss that's put onto a product.

we hadn't made any work for the web we'd previously been making commercial CD-ROM products we had a certain set of skills and we were looking at how to migrate them we had, in Colin Green in particular had skills in writing lingo scripts for Macromedia Director IOD 4 that you see here is written in Director using lingo So we decided to make some advance towards the web and find out what the web was using the tools and the skills that we had there in front of us. So during 97, during the six months in 97, we started to make a tool to inquire into what the web might be.

In particular, we're interested in, with reference to recent histories of video, we're interested in looking at the structures and maybe the distribution of work or the networks that might exist, or looking in places that we weren't allowed to look. So we built this tool and launched it very late on in 1997. We launched at a place called Backspace in London, which probably has been mentioned in some of the other presentations that you've had here. There's an independent media space, a physical space and server space that ran in London from, I think, 1996 to 1999.

It closed during the Christmas vacation last year. we launched with a fairly for us a fairly precise public relations exercise, we made stickers and posters which we covered as much of London as we could with, we made sure we got reviewed in places, Wired.com reviewed us on the day after we launched and we started to get many hits on the Backspace server. We had 2,500 downloads in the first week of release. That's continued over the three years, so that now it's leveled out about 1,000 downloads a month.

So, looking in detail at the WebStalker, IOD4, Matthew will just walk through some of the functions of the WebStalker. We'll just close some of the windows that are open right now. Okay, so this is a tool to find out what the structure of the web might be, what it is. The software is executed. You point it at an HTML document, any HTML document. The window at the top of the screen here, the crawler window, is giving you some feedback as to what the software is doing once you have pointed it at an HTML document.

So here we go. There's no www in there. Okay, so we'll point it at our site, the IOD site. This is the URL for downloading the software. Okay, so you can open up various windows, various channels onto the process that the software is undertaking. The window that Matt's made here is a map that's showing in the centre of the screen, if I can see the centre of the window, the URL that Matt initially pointed to. the software is reading through an HTML document, looking for links to other documents.

It's then chasing those links and representing the link by line and an HTML document by a circle. Very simple representation. That process will continue. You can just leave the software online and it will continue chasing those links. if you can drag one of the circles into a window that Matt's called given the function of extract it will do a very very rudimentary passing of the HTML it's taking out the markup it's just giving you the text that is marked up within the HTML document so it's a stripped down way of getting access to information on the web.

The software is restricted to HTML space. It doesn't like JavaScript, for example. It doesn't like CGI's. It'll only give you access to HTML documents. But if we make a dismantle window here and drag one of the documents across to it, it lets us look a little bit beyond HTML space. And if you click on some of these circles, If there are any things like mail-tos, for example, it will show you that they exist. So this is a view of the web that you don't get through the browsers that you're probably familiar with, Navigator and Explorer. it banishes the

it rethinks the relationship between you as a user and the data, it doesn't position you within it Explorer and Navigator both are informed by discourses in HCI, various established problems for HCI, problems of the classic lost in hyperspace or data space they traditionally and when we're talking about how many years maybe 20 years worth of research that's gone into this providing people with tools of navigation that are based on navigation through physical spaces so looking for landmarks setting crumb trails or whatever the techniques are for orientating yourself with this there's a different relationship

between you and the data you're not immersed within it you're performing a tactical strike onto the data a surgical strike if you like hence the name, the web stalker it's not ruminant, it's not a flaneur it's not wandering it's something that has purpose has utility and fairly strict set of functions Okay, so I think we should move on actually to a piece of work that came from the WebStalker.

It's a piece of work done not as IOD, it's done under an alias because it's a commercial piece of work. It's a commission by the architect, as was mentioned, Zaha Hadid, for the Millennium Dome in London. This was a piece of work that was sponsored by... Did you see that happening? Yes, yeah. By her office, there's a guy there called Patrick Schumacher, who'd seen this work when it was shown in Austria at Ars Electronica several years ago, and approached us to make a piece of software that was a piece of communication graphics, really. This piece of work was a tool for inquiry. It was an investigation. After several years of theorising and coming to understand what the web was

and what the software was and its relationship to networks, we applied what we knew to this other piece of software. And I can show you some rushes that the BBC shot recently, just to give you some idea of the physical environment that the software's installed in and some of its functionality. Okay. I'll just make sure that's really good. I hope this is queued up.

Possibly. Okay. So Matt, can I leave that with you to just make sure it's rewound and then play whenever it's on? This piece of work that we're going to show here. It takes a similar visualization technique and applies it to a slice of the domain name system, the DNS. It takes the domain name system as a hierarchy with a root and domains such as .edu or .gov or whatever falling away as a tree, as a tree structure, a hierarchy.

It draws it in an end-on cone diagram. You might have seen the presentation by Martin Dodge that runs cybergeographies.org. So maybe you're familiar with some of the net or web visualization tools that are out there. It draws a slice of the web as a cone and then tilts it up towards you with the root here, the nodes, the leaf nodes, or the HTML documents here, turns it around and points it towards you. It's a 3D model. Okay. Are we there? Just play.

The piece itself is an installation. There are two terminals that users can use in their own time. There are graphic representations of the web, very similar to the WebStalker, that are on touch screens. So you'll see nodes with links to other nodes that people move from node to node via the links. The terminals are input to a server that draws an aggregate image, a composite image of the inputs from the terminals.

and shows people's movement across the DNS network as they browse or stalk or whatever they do to the web. So in true demo style, we've got some technical problem. The software, as has been made as an installation, has potential to develop into a commercial product, which will not be done as part of the IOD project. It will still be done under the alias, the commercial alias that we use. Did you jump across different DNS servers?

talk through this. Here we go. So these are the touchscreen terminals. These are rushes, so they're ducking. So you see people touching the screens. There's a central node with other nodes linking off of it. Some very rudimentary passing of HTML again, as was shown before. So some of the text stripped out of an HTML document. These touchscreens input to this larger back projection. And you can see where there are ripples coming out. This is people's position on the DNS as they browse the web. So if someone goes from, for example, a .edu site there, if there's a link on a HTML document to a .gov, for example,

you see them move across to another section of the DNS. There are some trails that I don't know if you can't really see them too clearly on this, But for example, there'd be a blue trail from this node showing a history, like a rolling 12 or something of the last 12 HTML documents that you've browsed. This piece is, the copyright is owned by the people that run, that manage the Millennium Dome in London. but the copyright reverts back to us after a year, and we have the potential to reinstall it in maybe a slightly different way than they've chosen to do. It has the potential to have 18 touchscreen inputs.

For budgetary purposes, there were two touchscreen inputs. Okay. So I think we get a little bit of footage of the DNS again in a second. This is tracking an individual user's use of a slice of the web. So we give them access to a slice of the hierarchy. This is not a live piece of software. There's no connection to the net. Okay. Well, I'll leave it there.

Right. So I'll hand you over to Matthew to continue. Okay. Okay, this is basically just a short piece of information about another project which is related again to maybe in a sense the webstalkers kind of deconstruction of websites and the structure of the networks, the way that how they were composed in relationship to kind of the hot cause of the net, the way various kind of cultural forces superimposed themselves on what was on and what was off the net.

And this again is a project to take something that is very well known about digital culture to take it apart and to start looking at it in another way. This project is based around a deconstruction of Microsoft Word I had actually presumed you'd have a copy on this machine but luckily you don't so you haven't been that victimised yet so I'm not going to show you more specifically but basically the project is to go through Microsoft Word whatever the latest version is and just map it piece by piece to take it apart and dissect it so each visual resource, each element in the programme

is taken apart, separated and eventually produces this map, which is going to be installed in a series of galleries, basically as in one large map that shows the kind of conceptual and technical infrastructure of this project. So the methodology of the project is derived in part from computer science. So one of the tools being used is ResEdit, which is a resource editing program used by programmers to design and adjust the user interface and other deeper elements of applications. It gives access to elements such as dialogue boxes, menu items, alerts, cursors,

and any associated sounds and so on. I don't know if you saw the Mongrel presentation, but they had... I worked with them to do some other work using ResEdit on applications, such as re-versioned video games and also another version of Photoshop called Heritage Gold, which was a kind of race and gender editor, a class editor. Such programming tools as ResEdit are normally used to weave together more coherently what might be seen as a certain format of performativity throughout a program, the ways that the program structures the relationship between itself, data, and the user. And this project uses the same tools for the illegitimate ends cracking open

rather than reinforcing these structures. So the final form of the project is about 3,000 to 4,000 pieces of paper, each one carrying a resource from Microsoft Word, a separate visual element. And the reason why Microsoft Word is the thing I chose is basically because, as someone who spends a lot of time writing, it's basically the mental environment that I and workmates work in constantly. But it's something we never actually look at. And it's a particularly suitable target since the application is massively overloaded with features. features, each of which cater to specific cultures of use. So the different kinds of

work practices are all crowded into this same mega application. Many of these different cultures of use do not overlap except in the core functions of the application, i.e. text entry. So this is the 7% of the actual application. Word is an archetype of the monolithic, one-size-fits-all culture software. And because it's contained so much interface designed with corralling massively disparate populations of users within the same system, it makes an ideal object to be gutted in this way. And for instance, this kind of exponential increase of features If you actually look at Word, you'll find there's four different kinds of help within the same application.

So not only is there one kind of help which just guides you through the software, there's also completely inexplicable layers of help, including personal assistance, archives of facts, and so on. So it's impossible to fully understand complicated artefacts such as computer programmes on their own terms unless they are actually used They contain many thousands of inter-operating elements which are often only fully understood by their engineers once they're being put into play At the same time though, effective use of a programme demands the correct rules of knowing and doing even down to the correct micro choreography of fingers, eyes and posture

are internalised by the user before the programme can effectively be used. In order to reconsider the place that cultural technologies such as word processors have in our lives it's in some ways necessary to unlearn them. One way that this unlearning might be done is to provide a parallel documentation is to provide a parallel. So documentation in this parallel, documentation of live art, is in some senses thought to reify the processes of performance. It pins it down, it deadens what was a live, processual event, and therefore estranges the work from its crucial lived core. A more codified area of practice, the archive, locks down something more vivid and ephemeral.

in other areas through an active utilisation of a similar estrangement perhaps contradictorily objectifying of two natural or two lived technical and aesthetic habits may be useful in encouraging a break from them. So in this sense to use the media ecology of the gallery, something which is a kind of very slow, very dead, very objectifying space and to superimpose it on something which is processual, in this case software, to lock a piece of software into this very codified, very classificatory system, the gallery, and

to use the quality it has of objectifying things is actually to be able to pin it down and start to break down how it operates in terms of the cultural machine. So taking a piece of software that's commonly experienced as a complete, multilinear and processual artifact with various layers of sequence and locked interaction, flattening its hierarchy of choice trees in order to force every layer into simultaneous visibility, challenges the formatting of knowing and doing put into place by the discipline of human-computer interface. So, again, in a similar way to the web stalkers, acting against the immersive quality of digital media

to try and step away from it a little. Microsoft Word is a particularly good target for this work, as in particular as a machine that operates on, in and through language it makes an interesting site of exploration. The interplay of tensions between formal, i.e. logical, and natural languages the repetition of various alerts, dialogue boxes or warnings and the apparent uniqueness of the event which they respond to the flat user-friendliness of the standardised English that circumscribes the environment within which even the most radicalised or literary or emotive textual production is performed. The differing status of the document and the application

and the cultural and technical specificity of different language codes such as ASCII or Unicode and so on and its variants are all areas to be opened up. And this is something you actually start to see laid out as a machine in front of you rather than something you're embedded within and kind of have to operate inside of. So when all the composite elements of an interface are brought into the field of vision, the simple accrual of decontextualized detail and its asymmetry with what we know, tricks other ways of understanding software and its machine invisibility into emergence. Okay, do you want to show you more? Okay, I'll be fairly brief.

I'm not aware that time's pressing, But we're into that unknown territory that Matt mentioned at the start of the talk. There's a project that I've been working on for six months in collaboration with someone called Mark Greco, who used to have in his family a recipe for Italian ice cream that somehow disappeared for various reasons or another. and he personally wanted to find this recipe and to rebuild the ice cream that was once produced by his family. This was in the 1950s in the UK. So we decided to take some of the methods that we'd maybe understood

from the culture around software and take them into food science, take them into popular foods. Ice cream in the UK used to be a popular foodstuff. It then became the gourmet foodstuff, drawing in particular from trends in the US, where in the few days that we've been here, I've been trying to look for people eating ice cream in the street and kind of find many people, I guess they're all in their condos or whatever, with their big tub of Haagen-Dazs. And as a word of warning, I notice this is happening to your coffee as well, which should be drunk as and when with your friends and peers. But it's actually now described as gourmet hot beverage or something, so be careful.

I'll show you some of the, just quickly, the website so you can get to the URL, hopefully, for this. Okay, yeah, if you could put that, just to get the ice cream for everyone's sight. Okay, so we took some of the principles that you might find when people crack software. Okay, because this recipe was nowhere we could find. It actually turns out that it was actually still in the head of my colleague Mark's dad, but he wouldn't actually reveal the recipe to us. So we bought a lot of commercially made ice cream, the main brands that you're probably familiar with over here.

And we decided to, at the time I thought it might have been reverse engineering, but it does turn out to be a different sort of approach. We started to build object structures from the ingredients that you find on the containers for ice cream. The intention was to find one particular recipe, which we have done. It was also important for us to build a machine where there could potentially be many types of ice cream coming from. So we found out that there are, in particular, two types of ice cream that are made that are familiar in a U.S. and U.K. environment. There's one that's very dairy rich and there's one that's impoverished and comes out of the rationing that was imposed in the UK after World War II.

So this is, Matt's just going through, this is some of the, we were using our cell phones to communicate as we were experimenting and trying to find out what the recipe was. we've been giving the ice cream away in the same way that IOD gives away software we've been doing gigs they've been gigs really we've been going to pubs and we have done a few art openings as well the ICA in London was in December was the last one that we did and we give people back their ice cream this is a social ice cream it's not proprietary it shouldn't be branded you should be able to make your own flavour of ice cream The same sort of principles that inform the IOD project. At one of the gigs we met Richard Stallman, the Free Software Foundation guy,

and he told us that we thought we were making open source ice cream, but he said, no, be precise, this is free ice cream. If you have any recipes or if you have any ideas about the project, there's some feedback forms here. We hope to be touring this project. We're touring it in the UK to various sites that are sensitive to ice cream, like to the part of the country where the dairy farmers are who are currently having some problems economically. We're going to tour it to some farmers' markets that are just becoming popular in the UK. And we're also going to take it to its hometown, the town where it was last spotted. And we hope to tour it to other locations worldwide.

We just had an interview on NetTime that Matthew conducted with us. So there are plenty of texts around to contextualise this. It's been particularly important to look at this recently as Unilever have bought Ben & Jerry's, the great libertarian ice cream. Okay, well, I'll leave that there. There's plenty of time for questions then, if anyone has any. I have a question. I was wondering, you guys were talking earlier about how IoT, well, you've mentioned a couple of times how you've given away software and you work in an art practice, I guess, ideally. And then you also talked about the potential commercial applications

for the other software you're developing. And it seems like you were sort of having trouble bridging that gap. And I was wondering if you guys could talk about that a little bit. Okay. There's no problem bridging the gap. We decided from the start of the project to make a break, to not mix the two. We do use an alias so that we can keep any commercial work separate from the IOD project. We used to call it a playpen, but it has matured somewhat since then. It's important for us to keep a space where we can experiment and take risks and do things unknown. Yeah, I think basically there's different rules that apply in different locations. So one allows you to do exactly what you want. within a certain set of possibilities,

another is a lot more limited. So that's why we use different names in different contexts. Okay. Now, when you talked about the, I was looking forward to seeing something on the word deconstruction, you know, are you, like, now a work in progress? Yeah, it's working, I haven't got it here. What it actually looks like, I mean it basically just looks exactly like Microsoft Word So if you take Get get Microsoft Word anything. That's got a black one pixel width outline on it and then separate it out from everything else then I every resource in Microsoft Word then that's

That's what it looks like so It's just a lot and lots and lots of very boring looking objects basically Yeah, it turns out to be about 4,000 different elements that basically compose the whole structure, the whole surface structure of Microsoft Word. But most of them are kind of repetitious, very minute variations on exactly the same thing. But I think probably because I've had to go through it so many times, I'm probably the only person who's actually seen the entire extent of this kind of dive program. But once you begin to see the entire map of how it preempts

or how it understands in advance the way people write, the kind of documents that are important in the culture of software that it proposes, you begin to find how very limited the thing is. so there's no wizards for producing avant-garde novels or rap lyrics it's all wizards for producing CVs and so on looking pretty yellow there so what are the next project after this? we have an ongoing project, IOD 5 which is always six months away

whenever you ask when it's going to be out. It's a visualization tool. It visualizes social networks generated from chat software. So the intention is to write some chat software and then write some mapping tools similar to that that you saw with the Webstalker, which shows social network. It would also be to move towards expressing in some way the meaning of the links between nodes. Because you notice with the webstalker all the links were the same length. There's no meaning extracted or implied by the distance, the proximity of nodes. So obviously with the social network we can pull out the things from the connections between

people and represent them in some way. So looking at Sahadeen, are you learning from her or she learning from you or you learning from her? We were just commissioned by her. She commissioned something like 15 pieces of work I think for a zone, a part of the Millennium Dome. I don't know if you're familiar with it here, but it's like an expo, you know, it's the state of the nation. Well, I don't know. For me, it was a dog. I believe an ideal friend of mine is part of the idea. We have a silly dumbass million. We have a book on John Petron. We have a legal piece.

We really want to ask you that question. I think maybe you might have been influenced by her own design process, or she may have been influenced by what she's already doing. Yeah. I think maybe we went through, maybe when they saw the work, we were describing it as, I think we saw the tail end of modernism in it in some way, you know, her unfinished project that she's completing in some way. I think there's parallels between IOD's working practice and say constructivism for instance which uses our methodologies but moves them into something else which is not just art. It's also used as a piece of a real piece of software and we always try and create something that steps outside the paradigm of art but also messes with the paradigm of software but it's still usable.

you know so I think that kind of stuff plus there's lots of lines going lots of different directions means it looks pretty similar what kind of reception did you find for that piece the one that you I think was the ICA where you had the web stalker where it was visualised and for the BBC clips I'm sorry I don't remember where that was that's the millennium dark that's yeah yeah for the web store the web web store has done very well for itself actually since it was released we bring that condition and I'll rematch in our electronica ID magazine industrial design magazine

I guess I mean more literally the audience app. Oh, right. It seems to be something that at least provides a launch pad for a lot of people's fantasies about what the web is, what it might be. So quite often you'll get people after you present it, or after people have seen it, they'll always get in touch with you and come up to you and say, that was brilliant but why didn't you do it with this 3D walkthrough or why didn't you do it with this and this feature or why didn't you do it with this and this feature so what it becomes is a kind of a mode of imagination this kind of popular imagination of what the net might be and for us that's a great response but we just don't have to do the work

so yeah and this is why we're kind of interested in very specific pieces of software that kind of just lock, just kind of move into very conventionalized areas, very well understood, very lockdown paradigms and just kind of open them up really. Yeah, you need to write software that has the rest of the 7%. Yeah, that's right. Loading with the features. I think what we should do is write software that's open somewhere that other people can write whatever they want through the software. and that's been a problem for our practice actually. We came up against that on release of the WebStalker when we launched and there was the 2600 hacker contingent from London so it's an amazing piece of software but we can run it. It doesn't run under Unix and we can add a functionality to it that we want

and we realised that at the moment that we'd compiled it and released it and we have had offers from university departments to take this as a research project for someone and re-engineer it as a Java application, for example. Which is something we'd be interested in. We just don't have the resources, we don't have the time at the moment to actually extend that project. What would you rank the next one in? This has become a real problem. We did most of it in Lingo. But then we realized basically the rest of the stuff we wanted to do, we just couldn't do. So, Collins, he does most of the program, he's now learning Java. So Java, is there consensus now with the next panel? It seems to be.

It's a network software, distributed software that we're making for the next piece, so it makes sense. And it plugs into the Linux culture that's emerging. I think in a way, we found it useful to work in Lingo because basically it was a really a really cretinised tool and it was kind of two fingers up to the computer science area which is very skilled relative to what we are but does nothing basically except reproduce what's already known so to do something with very small skill base but open it up was what we hoped with that so it's basically just to say whatever level of skill you've got

I'm just going to do something. But now, I think to do the next thing that we want to do, we're actually going to have to learn something a bit more seriously. So, yeah. That's great. Appreciate it. What's Mocha? When is Mocha? 830. 830? Yeah. Okay. Okay, so we should wave to all the people out there in Netland. Thank you.

Shall we go down? Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you.