Today I have my first Skype meeting. Ever. I didn't really think about it, to begin with. I use Skype a lot to talk with my family and friends, and I go to a lot of meetings. But as I was getting my notes together, the combination of the two circumstances brought up a memory of coming home from school and excitedly watching “Star Trek: The Next Generation” on the tiny wood-veneered TV in the kitchen, with mum scraping carrots in the background. Watching Captain Picard on our little screen having a meeting with someone else on another little screen far away. And I got that wonderful feeling that only comes from doing something in real life that previously only existed in fiction.
My meeting will be with Pierre-Malo Denielou, computer scientist and outreach representative of the Computer Science department of Royal Holloway University, where in a few weeks time I will be presenting a new artwork. This has been commissioned by Home Live Art to take the form of a stall in their Science Alternative Fete, with a theme of “Storytime Science”. Artists have been paired with science departments to create works referencing the research carried out at the university. It is a very particular challenge because of the combination of three elements. 1 – the depth of specialist academic research as opposed to general 'topics'. 2 – the stall itself needs to be simple, accessible and fun. 3 – the work must not compromise its integrity as art. To me this is an irresistible puzzle. I already have some experience with 2 and 3. Today’s meeting with Malo is the first step in gathering information about element 1.
My previous knowledge of computing is wide ranging, but low on specific detail. Computers and computing have been an interest throughout my whole life, and a deep-rooted but largely invisible inspiration to the methods I use in my work.
I was born in 1980, so have been lucky enough to experience the 'revolution' in home computing without ever having been able to take it for granted. I didn't grow up with computers as a normal part of life – they were always something special. My father – a wastewater engineer – used to take me to visit where he worked from time to time and if I was really lucky, I'd get to visit the “typing puddle” where there were all these machines juddering away and doing things to words. As a kid I wrote stories all the time – by hand – and I remember the wonder of a machine that could allow people to arrange words with such clarity and speed; transforming something that was essentially linear, into something blocky like lego.
At some point Dad brought home a Commodore 16, which lived in the attic. He, my little brother and myself would play games together, and I would spend hours copying programs line by line from hobby magazines to make varieties of sounds and long-winded question and answer programs. I wanted to understand how the thing was getting stuff done.
We started having IT lessons in school, but I found them very frustrating. All having to memorise commands and fill in spreadsheets to achieve specific results, but no one explaining what was actually going on. Computers gradually became a thing you were supposed to be good at using or not. Something you could use to do things that started with the word “computer” or “digital” - computer design, computer music, digital art and so forth. This made it seem something very distant from the subjects I was good at – art, English, history, drama. The initial three dimensional wonder was lost for me as it became all about what you could make happen on a screen, and struggled to get past that point.
However, by the time I left school, my brother, who is home educated, was learning how to build his own computer. He showed me around it and the old fascination came right back. I learned from him and his tutor and built my own – which travelled with me through university and the start of my career in art. I loved that machine. I understood what it was made of physically, but how it actually really worked was a mystery I could not get my head around at all. I wanted to, it just didn't stick, and I didn't know why. Individual veins of information, though, continued to become part of my work. I constantly found inspiration and solutions to physical problems in descriptions of computer processes and methods. At university, I became very interested in translating techniques used in creating videogames into writing and directing live theatre. A series of collaborations with Dr. Anthony John Allen fed principles of computing in astrophysics, and the dangers of obsolescence into my work alongside patterns of the English Morris. A glimpse of an architects model produced using an early 3d printer began a series of works created by attempting to do the same thing by hand. I was never interested in using computer technology itself as a creative medium. For me, the interest was in transferable patterns and techniques, and a deep curiosity at glimpsing a huge landscape of potential just beyond my field of comprehension.
In 2009 I visited the Kelvedon Hatch Secret Nuclear Bunker on a day off, and saw computer punch tape for the first time. Looking at that tiny piece of perforated paper pinned to a board, I finally understood how a computer actually worked. What it was actually doing and why it was so staggeringly beautiful.
I remember when I was very young, maybe three or four, there was a fairground organ called, I think, “The Gladiator” that used to come to our town on special events. A huge glossy beast with pipes that roared out music while wooden dolls and disembodied sticks bashed cymbals and drums. It was loud, and terrifying and wonderful and it DID IT BY ITSELF. The first time I saw it I screamed in horror. Then I made my parents take me again. And again. And again. And one time its keeper opened up the back and let me look inside at the pumps and gears and the long strip of perforated paper getting sucked up into the workings. I burst into tears and everyone thought I was frightened again or sad that it had spoiled the illusion but I couldn't explain that I was crying simply because it was perfect.
And standing deep underground in that old government office, surrounded by dead screens and one still clattering teletype, I learned that computers were the same thing. And that's what had been drawing me in all along.
From there I began reading and researching the history of computing. Not in a focussed way, or with any particular end in mind, it was just interesting to me. I'd find the odd book in a charity shop, references in books I was already reading, get drawn to articles online, have conversations with people who knew a little or a lot. It was an escape from the open-ended world of art. It was a hobby, and I'd never had one of those before. I became a bit more pro-active about it, visiting other museums, revisiting many from my youth, seeking out books and information. For my birthday, I was taken to the Science Museum's computing gallery by an expert friend who spent hours patiently answering any questions I wanted to ask about why rather than how they worked. People who got to know that I was curious invited me to look at private collections or systems both historical and modern. I gathered a reasonable hobbyists understanding, and that fed into my professional work as an artist.
I still don't make digital art, and am no more than a regular user of my home computer. That to me feels very separate from what I am interested in, and find so hard to pin down.
Last year, after giving a talk on an art project I was working on to a local Linux user group, I stayed for their meeting and joined up right away. At my first meeting, they had been donated a large collection of broken computers from a school and were stripping them down, assembling working machines from parts and loading them with Linux to use in other educational projects. I spent a blissful four and a half hours taking things apart, putting them together and – for the first time – learning about software with a basic understanding of what it is actually doing. For Christmas, my brother bought me Raspberry Pi, and I have been relentlessly tinkering and poking about, and making what would previously have been prohibitively expensive mistakes. And that's about where I am. I'm right at the start of that journey. I've been learning how computing machines do what they do. Now I want to learn how to communicate with them myself.