In 1991/92 I got involved with Heath Bunting's Cybercafe bulletin board(BBS). Connecting to it through the JANET network. Phoning up a computer in a cupboard in his flat was such a curious thing to do, it was inspiring. We'd already been through all the interesting aspects of Pirate/experimental readio broadcasting, and Heath was taking it to the next step. I had been having a go with the Janet network up at U of Northumbria, and it was a joy using up those big real floppy discs, as opposed to the ones that came in the hard plastic cases (they were never proper floppies). poetry polemic and dialogue, share files, online chat, lovely. Marc Garrett and other people were on there too.

At the same time I was having my first go at using Apple Mac's with ye olde Adobe Photoshop. Even though doing anything took a 45 minute coffee break while the computer cranked away at the numbers, I was impressed by what was taking place while I was out of the room. Up to that point -during the eighties- I'd been through Commodore 64's, dot matrix printers, tape cassette software, spectrum game making, working up to borrowing Simon Lee's Amstrad (which was the first one I used that looked like a proper PC. Even published a little book.

I think 92 was the first time I used a computer in one of my installations, "Living and Breathing Space", part of my m.a. final show. Just a black and green screen with a poem on it facing the locked window door of an office that you could not enter.

I started playing around with poetry and programming for a while after that. A couple of years later I was on line at Cheltenham and CERN had come out with the "www". I was modem connecting with Mosiac software before it became Netscape. Once when I was working on the BBS Heath popped up and texted hello, which scared the hel out of me. I thought it was just me and the computer. but oh no, that wasn't going to last.

It must have been 96 when annie and I got our e mail sorted, and publishing poetry by sends and regular installments just seemed the natural thing to do with it. Miguel Lamaire and Pyrowords was out there then, using that collaborative poetry software written by .... , and it was an exciting time for dialogue and so on. In 98 annie and I branched out, teaming up with Koka Ramashvili, to start Here nor There, and then working even more closely with Neil and Roger on it. The more popular it got, the more limited it got too, we started to understand that what we took for granted - Electricity/electrocity itself could be a big hurdles for people in other places in the world, but the computer screen masked all that, and blinkers the user from real world basic realities.

That may well be where the fascination with the virtual world comes from - I'm not sure computers like reality, they're more comfortable making up their own.

m.d.