Interview with Rachel Baker and Heath Bunting
St James Park, London, UK
August 30th 99

JB: What I want to ask you about is community - if you think it is sucessfully built through collective art practice, and how a global art community creates public space. But before we go into that - I'm still confused about the extent to which early net art was as utopian as people say it is. The early stuff is always described as kind of naively utopian.... I wonder how you think about the early days, how you remember them?

RB: I remember being really quite excited about it all actually.

HB: Well, you should say where you came from really, that you came from Gwent...

RB: Yeah, but we didn't really have much notion of the net.

HB: It was like the church of net gnosticism, innit.

RB: It's the Newport School of Art and Design..

HB: That Roy Ascott bloke.

RB: I was a student in the Interactive Arts department, although at that time it was called Fine Arts. It was then headed by Roy Ascott...I don't know if this is particularly relevant...

HB: It is because they were very full of hype.

RB: There was already a certain degree of evangelism about the arrival of cybertopias, and although I had a healthy dose of synicism about it it was still something, territory that was going to be claimed, something to drive towards.

JB: So did you feel like the fact that people hadn't made art on the Net before, or if they had then only in quite a marginal way, created a space of new opportunities or a space of the new?

RB: Well, as a student at that time we were always confronted with this word 'interactive'. It wasn't so much computer art or net art, it was 'interactive art'. One of the manifestations of that is that we were encouraged to create works that the user would interact with. We didn't have internet til the final year, and Ivan Pope came along and consulted, introduced some of us to the net at a very low level.

HB: I think it's quite typical of a lot of this utopia stuff is that there was a lot of propaganda coming out of Gwent, but they weren't actually on the net. They were saying that you could upload yourself, blah, blah, blah, and it's interesting has said to me, that the students were quite anti all this, and they were campaigning to have studios, and you were told that you din't need to have studios because you could work virtually, but there wasn't even any internet connection.


JB: So what kind of tools did you have? Just stand alone computers, or networked via intranet or what?

RB: We had very few computers when I was there, and it wasn't until my final year in 93-94 did they have a substantial amount of computers to play around with. Before that you were encouraged to pick up video - actually my area of work was audio, and in fact radio was one of the ways that I could get a grip of the concepts we were being introduced to, i.e. cyberspace and interactivity.

JB: So the internet seemed just like a rumour - or presumably you'd seen it.

RB: Yes, but not until I left did I have much experience of the Web. It was always a kind of abstract thing, the whole notion of virtual reality and cyberspace. It was always delivered to us in a very abstract way, which was actually very beneficial in some senses because in a way it is, it is an abstract idea.

JB: Was it really drawing off the inevitably Gibson and Haraway sources?

RB: Yes, absolutely. And on the one hand you had Roy's techno evangelism, and on the other hand you had other members of staff and their social criticism angle.

JB: And did the two not coalesce?

RB: Not really, there were always battles, which was interesting and frustrating at the same time. It was frustrating for the students because they were introduced to all these concepts - both cyber utopias and critical social theory - but they couldn't get there hands on any thing, they couldn't get down to....

JB: Practice?

RB: Practice, exactly. So a lot of them just went 'fuck that' and just started painting and writing poetry.

JB: So where did you end up, and how did the audio stuff develop?

RB: I ended up kind of going along with the critical social theorists, and I majored in theory in fanct, I wrote a paper about women and audio. I was really interested in radio as a social and technological phenomenon.

HB: [to Rachel] Don't pull that grass up.

RB: And it was one of the ways for me to conceptualise this idea of a virtual space.

JB: And how did women fit into that space?

RB: Oh well I had some notions about the aural realm as the feminised realm.

HB: Yeah, sexist notions.

RB: It was, it was kind of naive. There is a school of theory which goes along the lines of..

HB: Like John Perry Barlow saying that networks are like women because they're horizontal. 

RB: I guess so, yeah that kind of thing. Slightly misguided. But it was a high feminist phase that I was going through.

JB: Is that because text, in this paradigm, would be a more masculine thing?

RB: It's anti phalocentrism, antioccularism. It's the Freudian idea that the world is constructed according to the idea of a sort of phollocentric controlling gaze.

HB: And now your near your 30s you think that's a good thing don't you.

RB: Well, I just don't have such simplistic ideas anymore. 

JB: What about you Heath? What were your early brushes with cybertopia?

HB: Well, I think it's worth saying that networking has been around for a very long time and I've been involved in it from mail art and also. And there were kind of phases or boom periods in networking, so there was the mail art boom in I think the late 70s, and then there was fax art in the mid 80s and then there was BBS activity in the early 90s, and then mid-90s the Internet. And all these kind of people, you come across the same people - I mean I wasn't involved in mail art when it started.

JB: Yes, that would have been impressive.

HB: Yeah, but I was doing it in the 80s and there would be certain aims and then they'd crop up in the fax art scene, and then a bit in BBS and then certainly in the early days of the Internet.

JB: So who were the names that spanned from mail art, through fax art, into the Internet?

HB: Names like Hank Ball, from the Western Front, I think his name cropped up in these different things. It was mostly the DAX - Digital Art Xchange...

RB: He does a lot of audio art as well doesn't he, Hank Ball, he's very involved in radio and audio stuff.

HB: So there were people based in Paris and..

JB: Robert Adrian too I guess?

HB: No, I didn't have any contact with him, but I can't remember the name but there was this group in Paris.

RB: Simon Nora.

HB: So, because it was such a small scene it wasn't very politicised, there wasn't in-fighting, it was about networking as a tool of empowerment, and it could be for religious types or it could be for anarchist types, and they all somehow worked together to explore these so-called new things.

RB: Weren't you messing about with people like Karl Heinz?

HB: Yeah, like Karl Heinz for instance. It was only a few years ago that you said I've known you since the early 90s....

JB: So what were your early mail art projects?

HB: Well they were probably when I was 20, 22. I'd be rumaging round in scips, finding letters, pre-payed envelopes and get computers and printers and make false letters like letters from the Inland Revenue and send them to people. Just all sorts of pranks and hoaxes, and a bit of poetry I guess you could call it. And then at the same time I was doing pirate radio, and then I got my hands on a computerised fax system so you could basically you could run a fax bulletin board. Somone would send the one fax in, and then it would distribute it out during the night to 30 or 50 people, or to 0800 numbers which were free, you could send out 1000 faxes for free, and you didn't know where they came out, but they came out. 

JB: So what kind of stuff did you send? Was it generated by everyone? 

HB: Yeah, whatever anybody sent in got sent out.

JB: Do you know where it was  coming from necessarily?

HB: I knew some people. It was like the Internet where you got to know characters, not necessarily face to face. And the nice thing about the fax thing was it visual discussion. Somebody would send an image and then someone else would do something with it, or something completely different, but it would be like a thread. I really enjoyed that.

RB: One of the other elements that we were encouraged to confront at Gwent was actually art in public spaces. Anne Carlyle, who was one of our teachers, was one of the first people to use the Trafalgar Square, no Picadilly Circus dot matrix thing. But yeah, public spaces, making art out of the gallery, that was big in Newport. And so the Internet was an attraction for people who were thinking along those lines, who weren't thinking of putting a gallery on the Net, it offered another space to do whatever you were doing.

JB: Hmm, but what interests me about that is, well if you are making art outside the gallery, in the physical world, and whether it's commissioned by the state or whether you just put it up there in some kind of guerilla action, it's somehow always always going to be working in a local way and in a way that there's a community that can be seen, and known and understood in a way that doesn't exclude randomenss. So what I'm trying to say is that you put it into public space, which belongs to a nationality, beclongs to a culture, belongs to a city, some kind of demographic, and you can be specific about it in that way, but in other ways you can't be sure of how other people are going to encounter it. So you've got something very specific and very random, and I wonder how that kind of social dynamic transfers to the Net, or if it does. 

HB: Well, what some people might call random or haphazard might come from years of careful practice. But yes, there is a lot of randomness, that's one thing that attracts me to working outside. 

RB: The unpredictability's exciting.

HB: But it's not that unpredictable a lot of the time. Once you're experienced with that you can play with that a lot.

RB: No, I mean a lot of our project generate unexpected consequences.

JB: Do you mean the ones on the Net?

RB: Yes.

HB: But like the language thing. I put up a message saying we wanted translation and we've already got 3 or 4 people within in 4 or 5 days offering translation and one of the people is from a plant breeding institute and she's obviously been looking at the Superweed project.

JB: So she's come to it through doing searches on biotech?

HB: I've been basically fishing for people to translate the text and I had a good idea that people would, but I didn't think that it would get so many offers straight away.

RB: Fishing is a good metaphor actually.

HB: Well like we're hunter gatherers aren't we.

RB: But casting nets and fishing is a really good metaphor.

HB: [To Rachel] Well we try to only eat hunted food don't we. I do certainly.

RB: I don't bother about that, I just like the metaphor.

JB: So there are only things of certain shapes and sizes that you can pull in?

RB: Some things you have to throw back in the water, that's true.

JB: Or is that taking the metaphor a bit too far?

HB: Well, with fishing there is an element of skill but there's also a great deal of luck but you end up with something of quality, that's the thing that attracts me.

JB: So in a way what you're saying is that there's both habit and randomness on the Net in no greater or lesser amounts than there is in a physical space. But then if that's the case, how does it work in terms of a community of people who live together and share geographical space and the sorts of concerns that come from that versus the people who share a kind of interest space or a space of practice?

HB: The Net is the same as the street really. I used to do graffiti and, you know, you try to create a fiction in people's minds to entertain them or seduce them and draw them in to make contact. You'd do these things in a mysterious way, and then you'd be talking to someone at a party and they'd say, blah, blah, blah, I've seen this really strange stunt, and I'd say I know who's done that, or I did that. And you'd find that people were very comforted by finding them subsequently as well. And it's the same on the Net.

JB: What, by seeing the graffiti subsequently?

HB: Yeah, they'd feel like they were part of something. If they liked you and they like what you're doing. It's like what most graffiti, or certainly in the States now, is about claiming territory for evil drug gangs or whatever. It's the same thing here, but to gain territory in people's minds and share that and build a kind of dialogue.

RB: I don't know, I think it's kind of difficult to make these parallels between street and Net as public spaces.

HB: Why? They're almost identical.

RB: No they're not. No they're not. On the Net you've got very specific types of communication ...

HB: Yes, but the thing with the Net is that we don't use it the way it was intended and it's the same with the street. 

JB: But maybe the strategies are learnt from each other and reinforce each other, but at the same time there's only a particular type of person who's on the Net.

HB: There's only a particular type of person who's on the street with their eyes open. Most people have got their eyes shut on the street, they're going somewhere and they don't want to see what's in front of them. Most people don't look at what's written on walls, there's only a very particular type of person that reads what the graffiti says. I used to be able to tell who'd done just a scratch on the wall, because I would study that all the time when I was in Bristol.

RB: But back to the fishing metaphor, it was always interesting to me with the club card project, that you got an audience who wouldn't normally come and look at that, they'd come because they were caught, they were actually given a little worm. I was basically fiddling round with search engines, so people who were looking for Tescos...

HB: But that wasn't random was it....

RB: Middle class suburban housewives. 

HB: That was designed.

RB: Yes, that's what I'm saying. That's not the same as on the street.

HB: It is. You design something in a certain style, you put it in a certain place. It's like my X project, you know. I thought 'what's the best place to put that X, and I thought, and it was Embankment. At the time I decided that that road that goes down to Embankment tube from Charing Cross was the psychological centre of London.

JB: Why did you decide that?

HB: Just by thinking 'what's the centre of London'. And historically that place has got a lot of....I mean, if you look at that street, even though one side is totally destroyed by that new building, you can see that it's a very very old street that led down to the water, and it's been totally reclaimed by many people. And also it's totally full of homeless people, or as we say 'street people', and they've got a very good sense of where the centre of things is. Places that are public and are safe.

JB: So it's like you're sensitive enough to read the signs and at the same time you're aiming stuff at people who are also reading signs similarly to you. 

HB: Yes. Or you acknowledge that sensitivity in yourself and in other people, but then you do it in such a way that can bring in other people. So I'm not saying that all those people who have entered information on the X project, the tag thing, were like street people. Most people were probably engaged in some kind of occupation. But because I'd spent so long on the street and hung out with those kind of people - not directly, like drinking can so larger - you develop a sensitiviy, but then you can expand on that. Because I'd spent a lot of time fiddling round with search engines, you can easily expand that up into art practice, net art practice. It was very easy to expand that out into, like, Tescos. And as Baker said, get the housewives who like Tescos. So yes, it's essential to have craft, but then you can use to not just stay in the community that developed that craft.

JB: I suppose what I'm interested to know is if, when you talk about public art, that brings with it notions of doing something constructive in the public sphere. Whether there's a kind of social responsibility that goes with that, even when you're using pranks and hoaxes. Is it a benign practice? Is that what that's about? 

HB: Well, I grew up under a kind of seige mentality with Thatcherism, so most of my work is ...

RB: DEstructive.

HB: Is split into internal and external. So internally it would function to support people in the community, and externally it would like irritate people. Your work's like that

RB: I'm interested in constructing alternative networks.

HB: Tescos is an offensive project isn't it?

RB: Yes, it's an offensive, destructive project in some senses because it has a target. But at the same time the idea was to build and construct alternative networks off the back of corporate networks. It didn't necessarily achieve that but it threw up a model where you could, in theory, build an alternative network using stolen or parasited mechanisms. There's definitely an element of wanting to create idealistic structures, but not necessarily obsessing about them, just playing with them. 

JB: So you wouldn't judge success in terms of how many people participated and whether something was really lifted off the ground. Is it also possible to judge it in terms of getting those letter from, was it, Sainsbury's?

RB: At the time I thought that that was a success, but now I think it was kind of a cheap trick.

HB: But only because we did it three or four times....I think it is important to have numbers, but it shouldn't be a vulgar obsession. Irational gets 10,000 hits a day and that makes you a bit more serious about your work, you know. But then, you shouldn't be like 'oh, we get a million hits a day and therefore whatever we do is great'. It's just one of the factors of designing the work.

JB: You do seem to have a high profile in the media art circuit - how much do you think that has helped you get those 10,000 hits a day? The fact that you really are one of the most prominent net artists.

HB: Very little, very little. The thing with irational is that it's down to the work that we've done. The media arts circuit has been very good for making new contacts and getting paid and redistributing that money, but most of the hits come through on things like Rachel's Dot2Dot pornography page or my child porn page and then Mark's [??] radio pirate page. And none of them have had any coverage from the media arts scene. In, in fact they've condemned some of them.

JB: What?

HB: Well, my child porn search engine was condemned recently, because they totally misunderstood how it functioned - but that's just a detail.

RB: But all press is good press.

JB: So who is your ISP? 

HB: Easynet host our machine and we're part of the NetNames server. And we sometimes run into a new sys op who doesn't like having the words 'child porn' on the server. But they tend to just die away.

JB: So that would be an example of fishing, would be putting a term like 'child porn' in the title?

RB: Heath didn't put it in the title.

HB: It didn't work that way. The search engine returns what most people search for. So if most people search for 'fish' it becomes a 'fish search engine'. It's actually a critique on utopian net art because all the pages it returns are utopian net art pages, except that it replaces the word art with the word that's most sought after. So at the moment it's 'child porn search engine' and you click and then it finds sort of 10 pages; and they're all these things like, you know, 'oh we did a networking project' and it becomes 'oh we did a child porn networking project'.

RB: The thing is, the reason why it keeps throwing up 'child porn search engine' is because it's self-perpetuating. 

HB: There is a feed-back mechanism, yeah. People to it because it's child porn.

RB: And it will always be like that.

HB: If people change what they're looking for it will gradually change to their thing...

RB: It won't though...

HB: It will rise, it will rise to the top. That was the thing - to make a mechanism that would always rise to the top. It might even generate 4,000 hits a day, just by itself and then and then lower links off that.

JB: How do you think utopianism, if it still exists, has changed in the last four years?

HB: It changes all the time, like last year pornography could have been the net utopi but it was a bit too dodgy for most people to deal with. Now it's like...

RB: Net radio.

HB: E-commerce. Well, in the underground it's a bit net radio, but I've always said that's a temporary stop gap.

RB: Well, last year people were getting as excited and as idealistic about net radio as they were about the Web and net art. So after net art then net radio emerged, but now that's becoming more and more colonised and territorialised. 

JB: So, just getting back to what you said earlier about the femininity of aural communciation, do you think that there's something a bit similar there; that the specular stuff was taking priority in the Net and that audio was being ignored?

RB: I think there's an element of that for sure, and also because the people who are interested in net radio tend to come from a background of terrestrial radio anyway, and in those circles there's  none of the sort of hang-ups you get in the art world. It's more to do with engineering. The structure's completely different. It's about something else. There's something different about sharing a piece of audio with someone.

JB: And do you think it's more participative?

RB: I'd say so.

HB: It depends on the structure.

RB: I'd say it's less about consuming a product. Although, now it's becoming very commercialised, becoming big money and coinciding with this rise of e-commerce as well. The most searched word after 'sex' is 'mp3'. Music on the Net is big news, whether it's live streaming or audio files that can be downloaded.

HB: And also the people who were involved in the early net radio utopianism are now commercialised. They're making their livings doing that, so that utopian thing, I'd say, is disingenuous now. 

RB: Well then there's always been this pattern and rhythm of idealism and then after that follows a period of activity and then after that comes colonisation and territorialisation. 

HB: Well I think there's two sides to that. There's the people that genuinely go through different phases and try to feel out utopian social spaces, and move through them one at a time, and then there's the other side where people see that it's a new market and they make a big effort to commercialise themselves.

JB: But one truism about the market is that it's not really after highly innovative stuff. 

HB: Well, I mean the art market.

JB: Well, even that probably. Where the market really starts to kick in is in the second stage of a phenomenon. It can't somehow ever really embrace the first emergence of it, it's just too risky. 

HB: I wouldn't say it's risky, it's just that the pioneers aren't being rewarded. It's the people who capitalise on their efforts who are rewarded.

RB: And I think now that the underground or alternative set are looking to build their own economies and being able to capitalise on their own terms. Doing their own sort of capitalising, and that's why people like Olia Lialina are interested in building their own net art markets. And on the whole I think that's a positive thing. It's the same with net radio, with the software that Orang *** service, the authors of those softwares don't want that to be invisible, they want that to be very visible and they want to capitalise on it. 

JB: Is the capitalisation itself becoming more and more the content of the art?

HB: Did you know that we're going to start a bank, and irational bank?

RB: And I'm starting a business which is basically capitalising on the fact that the ICA offered us both a slot in a show in November, and this show is being sponsored by Diesel jeans. The point is that the show was supposed to be a political art show... 

HB: And it's not.

RB: It's not, well I mean....

HB: Well it's not is it?

RB: It can only ever be a representation of political art but for me what's interesting is that I'm gonig to use the money and invest it in a business and I'm going to run it from the ICA. It's going to be a recruitment agency. It's capitalising on art and

JB: Exploitation.

RB: Everybody's exploited all round. It's capitalising on artists as commodities. So it's very cynical on the one hand, but on the other hand everybody wins.

HB: No they don't.

RB: Everybody wins!

HB: No they don't!

RB: I don't? Why don't I win?

HB: I never said you weren't going to win. But not everybody wins.

RB: In theory, let's see.

JB: But do you think that there is some dialectic leap, or some freedom that can be gained by imitating precisely that thing that is oppressing you? Like the inevitable cycle by which the pioneer activity becomes mainstream, becomes depoliticise - to preempt that?

HB: You don't have to do that. There's a lot of nonsense, especially coming out of Amsterdam, that says if an underground project is successful then turn it into a business. It doesn't follow. It's that those people desire to have a business and they've struck it lucky. Like XS4ALL. Are they successful? I'd say they're not, because they've been sold to the Dutch [??] Telecom now. They're a complete failure. 

RB: They're a failure on one level, but a success on another.

HB: In terms of liberal capitalism, or crypto-liberal capitalism yes, they're a success.

JB: So what's your relationship with NetNames and how's that all working?

HB: Well, it's Ivan Pope who owns NetNames, and I've often offered him things in return, or services, but he doesn't want them.

RB: But there was already a deal. The reason that you got that virutal server, the irational virtul server, is because you sold....

HB: No it was independent that deal.

RB: But that was the impression I alwasys got, that you sold cybercafe.org to him in exchange for him hosting irational.

HB: No, he was already hosting cybercafe. No Ivan just gives us it because he's a frustrated artist. He's like - well the last time I spoke to him - missing the adventure of the art world, but totally hooked on the adventure of the business world, so in some ways he like helps us out. He thinks of it being good stuff - so...

JB: There are these artificial intelligent agents, which the artist Roc Pares has supposedly created called Freebiots, which go around the Net creating automatic and random hits and queries, effecting the reliability of access and query information. Having access to the information gathering processes on the Web is supposedly becoming more valuable than the information itself. But these bots start to mess with the legitimacy of those tracking systems. I'm wondering if this artistic strategy for outwitting commercialisation through applying its own strategies is in any way new?

HB: It's the old means/ends thing. Technique and intention. Most of my projects would have made very successful businesses, or not necessarily businesses but services that I could have sold as a consultant. Like even the X project that I was talking about could have easily been sold to Levi jeans. I think they've been involved in like doing graffiti things.

JB: Do you mean like low level, supposedly grass-roots advertising campaigns?

HB: Yes, that's one example. We're selling ourselves now aren't we, the anarchist movement in our generation is...

RB: The anarchist revolution is desirable now

HB: We're selling ourselves.

RB: It's not even that we had to sell ourselves. There's a really good text of convex tv's website actually called "Make Alias" about the desirability of marginal collective groups from many point of views. We all know about this cultural capital stuff that 's going on, and it get's really difficult. But convex tv view is 'make an alias', which I really like.

JB: And that is precisely one of the first things that people were attracted to the Net for is the anonymity.

HB: No, it's levels of disguise not anonymity.

RB: Well, it's both because they're different sides of the same coin. The desire for anonymity is similar to the desire for publicity. It's a similar desire that's being played out and there are lot of tricks to be performed, like generating more publicity, more attention to become more invisible.

JB: How does that work? Like becoming a corporation for instance?

RB: Yeah, hiding behind something you push out.

HB: It's like me being a professional artist. Most people don't realise what I'm actually about or what I'm trying to do. They take things for granted, like I'm a computer person, but then I've got a piece of chalk in my pocket and they don't realise that I've done, like, 5 years of graffiti.

RB: I was talking to Simon Pope the other day about making aliases and he sort of says the same. He's part of IOD which is the art oriented enterpirse and then they also have the business oriented enterprise and they kind of separate the two. Although, one informs the other, and one adds value to the other. With this project I'm doing at the ICA that's going to be a separate enterprise, it's going to have its own identity, to add another layer.

JB: What do you mean? It's going to have it's separate identity from Rachel Baker?

RB: From irational.

JB: Maybe one thing we should talk about is the technology as such. How important it is to the art? How much it is the centre of focus in a lot of the net art that's going on.

HB: I always make a separation in my work between very formal work - that makes a lot of references to the medium itself, like Own, Be Owned or Remain Invisible, I'd say that that's one of the closest things I've ever done to conventional art - and then most of my other work which is just craft to get across a political message or something like that. So like the World Service, which is what I'm programming now, is net radio bootware [*?] doesn't make many refereneces to the medium and it's not really arty. But it does provide a democratic production and distribution network for anyone that want to do net radio.

JB: So how is that working?

HB: It's just a scheduling service - anyone can have a schedule. And also it will be a database of audio servers that people can use for free. So the target audience that I'm concentrating on is bedroom people who, with just a few bits and pieces, can have as much of a presence as a corporation. But other, bigger organisations can use it as well. So yes, for me there's a useful distinction between the two: formalist work and then plain old stuff. Like one of my main definitions of art is 'craft plus politics'', for me it's those two things. I come from a craft background.

JB: How do you really distinguish art and craft then, at that level?

HB: Well, craft is technique and technology but also an appreciation of form. I used to make stained glass windows and it's funny that that was my most politicised time, when I tried to be in business during Thatcherism and basically got a lot of abuse, you know, even though we were doing free market stuff. We regularly got arrested or our stuff impounded, along with other people like British Telecom. When we used to get our van impounded, we'd go and pick it up and there'd be like 30 BT vans in the car park. So yes, it's interesting, I left that after becoming politicised through business.

JB: Where were you working?

HB: In Bristol. We became very politicsed by trying to earn a living. Funny twists. And then after that I took to the streets and did graffiti and fly posters and pirate radio. I became politicsed but not really historicised. I'm not like Jim Ball, the typical academic artist. I'm very troubled by that process of historical reference in art.

JB: Rachel, do you want to answer that question about technology as well?

RB: Yes. I don't have a terribly good relationship with technology, in terms of really being in control of it, so I tend to employ facets of it in a piecemeal way. But I'm really interested in learning programming.

HB: She's just got a grant from the Arts Council to learn Perl. irational has just got a programming grant. 

JB: How great!

RB: Very small. It means we can buy a book or two.

HB: No, it means we can take time out form our usual day to day lives and learn programming for about a week or two, which is quite a significant amount of time. A week of learning. My part of the grant - because it allows all irationalists to learn perl - has meant that I could spend the last week in Spain, programming the next part of irational which is the translation. We want to have an automatic translation facility.

JB: What that really works!

HB: Well, the pages would be translated by humans, but it senses which country you're coming from and then provides that page in that language or gives you the facility to change to another language automatically. So the front page is now in six languages and there's a thing on it asking if anyone translate this into more. So within the year it'll probably be within about 20 or 30 different languagegs. And Superweed, I'm targeting to have translated certainly into Hindi and Urdu for places where GM matters are really raging at the moment, like India. 

RB: And my business will require an on-line data base, which is something I'd really quite like to be able to create. I will need advice on it, but it's an opportunity for me to be able to write a bit of database software. 

HB: I think it's a really good time now for funding, because writing software is seen as an art form and now even marketing itself is seen as an artform, so we can apply for all sorts of marketing budgets as well.

JB: That's incredible. Funding programming - I can really see how that came about, but the fact that the Arts Council could, in all good conscience, fund you to do marketing is brilliant.

RB: Well, there is actually a fund for arts organisations that need a marketing budget.

JB: So you're coming at it from an organisational angle.

HB: Well, we're both aren't we.

RB: We will be using the opportunity to mess around with ideas that we've developed about marketing and critique it.

JB: But you're not making your application on that basis?

RB: Errr, no, although.

HB: It's covert.

RB: Well, we don't really have to hide it, it's obvious, and they welcome the critique anyway. In fact most organisations are aware of the new management marketing structures and how insidious it is and would welcome the critique.

HB: It's serving a function for them as well.

RB: We might not get htis funding by the way.

HB: Well, about the bank, I've been offered funding for that as well to start a bank.

JB: So tell me about the bank.

HB: Well, it came out of this thing of the market and the capitalisation of net art and also that e-commerce is like the next media of net art, after all these other things. Most people seem to be stuck in this critiquing the web browser still, and there's a big market for that. But the next stage of net art should be in financial networks.

RB: But Heath has this thing of always looking for the next big thing.

HB: And I'm always right! I was right with genetics, wasn't I? Brought out Superweed.

RB: Except you were a little be early maybe.

JB: You reckon?

RB: Well, in terms of making biotech into an art enterprise.

HB: Superweed is like at least a year or two ahead of its time. Most people, even in the field, don't believe it's true. They can't believe that Heath Bunting, grubby little street person, has made a biotech project that works. And that's one of the main things that I set out to show is that it's not a high church thing. With a bit of careful research on the Net you can make something that works. So the next thing to do is to do that with the bank.

JB: That's interesting that you've ditched biotech though...

HB: Well, I haven't ditched it.

JB: Ok, you've put it on the back burner for a while.

HB: Well, the context needs to be created or to catch up with Superweed for it to be understood or appreciated. When it came out, people said it was a hoax and discounted it. Now it's going to be in the ICA there'll be a bit more discussion around it. I was in Denmark a few weeks ago - they invited me there because they thought it was a hoax, and when they realised that it was a real project, they refused to show it. And it's the same with the ICA; they invited me thinking that it was a hoax and now they know that it's a real project they probably won't really show it there. They'll pay me the money, but they won't show it.

JB: Is that because they feel that they can be sued?

HB: Yeah, and in Denmark they had their own ethics that they were following. A lot of people there in the organisation didn't want to be responsible for releasing genetic engineering into the environment. They thought it raised interesting questions, but they didn't actually want to release it, so I respected that. Whereas the ICA, I imagine, are just frightened of prosecution. 

JB: And they don't have any ethics whatsoever.

HB: Well, I've started an internal mailing list with the ICA, without their permission, so that we can get this discussion going. So the art project has been so far has been about getting people to discuss biotechnology in the art context. But it's actually an authentic project; it does actually generate superweeds. 

JB: So what about the bank?

HB: Well, it's the same thing. To move into a new area or try to perceive a new context. Well, people have been doing art with money for a long time, but not on the Net as far as I know. And to show that it's possible to create a bank and to move your money around. Not just do it with LET schemes and symbolic systems, but to do it with real money.

JB: But how is it actually going to work?

HB: Well, the first stage is to do a lot of research. Second stage is to build some tools. I'd say we're at the stage now like we were 5 or 6 years ago when unless you were at a university or in big business it was impossible to get an email address, let alone a website. And it wasn't until hackers, like the demon mob, democratised it by bringing it to people's homes. If you want to transfer you money on the Net you can transfer your money via your credit card to buy, say, a snow board but you can't do anything else. It's the same with Compuserve 6 or 7 years ago you couldn't set up a news group unless you'd done a market research plan. I asked to set up a networking art newsgroup. They said, ok, you're going to have to pay us some money and then we want a 5,000 word report on how many new users you're bringing to Compuserve. And it's the same thing now; there are normal people or cultural practitioners on the Net who don't have access to financial tools that they can use in different ways. And the idea is to programme or hack them together, so that if you wanted to send $1 to 100 people you could, and that could be your art project. But at the moment, it would cost you $15 for each transaction, so you couldn't do it, unless of course you were buying a book, and then the transaction would cost you 10 cents. So everything is weighed against you and in favour of the corporations, and the idea is to make some tools to redress that. 

JB: So it's not so much a place to store your money.

HB: You can't think about storing your money until you have transport facilities. So if I carry on, I might do accounts. But if you come along and say I want to use Heath's tools, irational's tools, to build my own bank you could do that, because they'd be free. You can't do that at the moment, you're nowhere near being able to do that unless you adopt other systems that are made but not in your favour. 
But for me, it's very important because I've done a lot of gestural work. Certainly wiht net art you might propose something but you didn't actually do it. Superweed was actually the first thing - well I tried with Biotech Hobbyist magazine but that failed because Natalie Jeremijenko got pregnant twice - but Superweed was the first time I succeeded in making a symbolic project that actually worked in the political realm. It is actually a real biotech project, but it's offensive in the symbolic realm. And the bank is another thing like that; it will be a real operating bank, but the idea will be to destroy money not to create it. 

And I'm working on another project for Bristol, to build a subway system there. 

JB: Oh is that all?

HB: Well, you know I've got to try it.

JB: Why not just make a tram?

HB: No, the thing about subways is that people like digging, and they fantasise about it especially when they're children. Didn't you ever dig holes in your garden and try to go somewhere else? I did a lot. It's inspired by this Autonomous Astronauts thing, this grass-roots community thing, but the problem there is that it's very difficult to make space ships and it takes a lot. It's not so immediate, and the thing about digging a hole in your back garden is that you can start now. 

JB: So the idea is to solicit a spontaneous metro system?

HB: Yeah, you get people to set up their own stations first of all, and then they have to negotiate between each other where the tunnels go between them, and then they start digging. But you can say: 'well, my front rooms a metro station', you know. So that's the idea. I've just got to do it really. And if it works, Bristol will end up with its own autonomous metro system. It might have European funding, it might not. It might be funded by the local drug barons. 

But it's important that things actually work. Because of the arts funding system that we've had for the last 20 or 30 years, it's actually encouraged people to be ineffective. If I went to the Arts Council and asked them for money, and they asked what I was doing, I'd give them 4 projects and the ones that actually effected everyday life, they'd say 'Oh, we can't do that, it's too risky. But, you can do something that just proposes something or thinks about something. So people are just out of practice really. There's all this talk about intervening, but the financial system or art market prevents that really.

JB: But there's also a belief that working on a level of manipulating signs is ultimately, within a specular society, a very effective thing to do. I always find it so interesting how people talk about that but at the same time, when you get say 20,000 people together in one spot in the city - or however many people it was that went to the Carnival Against Capitalism - it hits the front page of the newspaper. So, even if doing something in the physical world has the ability to hack into the media system or specular system, then how can that be sidelined? CAE's idea, and what was talked about at Next 5 Minutes, that power is diffuse, that it's all happening in the networks and off the streets, gives artists a greater potency because they're sophisticated manipulators of signs, effectively.

HB: No, I think that's nonsense. There's a lot more chance of being dazzled and baffled and persuaded on systems that aren't intuitive. I would say, come on, come on the Net, listen to what I say, because people don't know what I look like and they don't have a sense of it. And to say 'oh, come on the street, exist in the physical world', people don't take that shit. The battle for people's attention, and for thought is on the Net because they're a lot more vulnerable.

RB: Graham Harwood always talks about the effectiveness of low level networks and communication. It's all very well making yourself visible in the general media, but it becomes yesterday's news so quickly. The structures that are going to stand up work on a far more invisible level, they're much more intimate, much more social.

HB: It's both. I see it as a foundation. You have to have a community of bodies before you can hack around the signs. When you've got 20,000 people in the city of London, it's a lot more meaningful than someone hacking into NASA or the Pentagon's computer. Even though June 18th was thoroughly misrepresented...

JB: What do you mean? That it was just about violence and getting drunk? 

HB: I'm sure that there was a lot of that going on, and that was one of the main points of it. Like with the poll tax riot, we all knew it was going to be a riot and we made it into a riot, and that was one of the points is that it was an offence on London.

JB: But at the same time, one of the things that made it such headline news too was not only the fact that they could print pictures of dyslexic 'yobs' graffiting on the walls of the city, but that they were also using the Net and hacking corporate sites.

HB: They probably weren't, they probably weren't. It's a story though. The good thing about hackers is that they're always invisible so you can write anything about them that you want. But if you've got 6 drunken street people hanging around outside the bank, you can't make a story about those people unless they've got some technolgical device like a mobile phone, because at the other end there could be someone in Libya funding the whole deal. 

A journalist rung me up from the telegraph the other week. They wanted me to talk about political hacking and I said they were talking shit.

RB: Of course they were, but all journalists are feeding stories and fictions to us. That's what they're there for.

HB: Don't pull up that grass!

RB: Shut up!

JB: Did you read on NTK now about this idiotic journalist from - I think - the Sunday Telegraph, who tried to infiltrate an Internet based anarchist organisation by faking his identity. He pretended to be this woman who was really sympathetic to their cause, but he sent the mail from his Sunday Telegraph account with his details unchanged. 

HB: The thing is, even if they do infiltrate - which is impossible because it's an open structure - then they're not going to have any effect which is what's so good about these organisations. It's nonsense what they say about J18 being organised by a secret closed network, it's not. And the police were complaining about how they'd been outwitted because all the information about J18 had been posted publically on the Internet and they didn't know how to find it. They can't figure that out, it'd have to be a secret. They'd have to hack into something or break into someone's house. 

All about bodies and land.

RB: Bodies, lands and stories.

HB: Well stories are there to control bodies and ultimately land use. That's why, when you have things like the Battle of the Beanfield off Stonehenge, it's not the stones so much as the piece of land that it's on and the number of people who want to go there. 

JB: But that's also about protecting national symbols.

HB: Stonehenge doesn't mean anything. So is Big Ben a national symbol, but people don't fight over that. They've got no chance because there's a barbed wire fence round it.

JB: Well, it's not so sexy either.

RB: It's not as old! Old means story!

HB: That's it: because it's old, you can make any story up about it you want. It's a good, religious social control mechanism isn't it? Especially for new agers. Nobody knows what it is - it could be a car park.

RB: It's art.

HB: It's not a piece of art!

RB: In my book it is.

JB: It's craft.

RB: It's art because people can attach all these stories to it.

JB: But it's not just an empty vessel - people can link it up to movement of the stars and seasons and that kind of stuff.

HB: Yeah - well I could link it up to the movement of data files to irational if I wanted. 

JB: You should start sending data files according to ley lines.

HB: Well if that would somehow effect how people could occupy that land, then I would do a project like that. But it wouldn't do that, it would just make me into a semi-religious figure and then I'd have control over the land. It should be common land, that's what it should be.

RB: Like Buckingham Palace.

HB: Yeah, it should be common. It's a symbol of our country, anyone should be allowed to go in there. Great Britian!

RB: It's great isn't it.

JB: It's Grrrrrrrrreat. Well thanks guys.

HB: Sorry for all the ranting.

Josephine Berry <josie@metamute.com>