Obsolete was a nascent Web design company, one of the earliest.

Your seminal Web boutique.

Yeah. And it wasn't even a company at that point...

No, it never even got to that stage. It was a very loose partnership between three founders and the combined efforts of as many people as we'd come by. And I think it shrugged off a bit of that role when Backspace opened, to its detriment, possibly, but that's how things go on. It was really only two years that Obsolete was functional as an entity doing commercial work.

Towards the end of the first year I was pushing for a much more self-supporting practice; to actually seek out work that we could do and generate our own means of support directly out of the equity of the world, rather than actually having to do work for Levi's, which was our principle client at the time. It wasn't our only client, but certainly the one who had the most cash. Which was good. Which meant we were able to do all sorts of things that were the beginnings of threads that have continued right through the current work. For instance, installing a lease line when it was nigh on impossible or overly expensive to actually attempt under normal circumstances, but in those circumstances we just put it in because we just charged Levi's four times over so it really didn't matter one way or another.
That was great. We were able to experience, I suppose to some extent, what people are getting in a much broader sense now, at that stage.

That was quite a liberation; using email in a very liberal way, actually being online and collecting and receiving throughout the day and building experimental webpages just for the hell of it and actually posting around, running a live server because that was the most convenient way to operate. So we all edited live onto the Internet, which was great. It is publishing, it is broadcast, and I think when there's so much talk about broadcast and this whole crossover and convergence of media - a Web server is a broadcast system, it's just the terms by which you actually operate it.

Define how closely that mirrors the old media, but really it's the perfect opportunity to go ahead and actually answer some of those impossibles that the underground faced for so many years. Which is my background. All I could see was the opportunity and the obstacle was obviously a technological one which more or less you climb over or get tangled in or whatever.

Backspace itself wasn't just this real space, it was also, or is now known, as a Web server.
And this experimental use of a Web server... Can you tell us about some of the projects that are good examples on that server?

When we opened the space, and we certainly had it in mind to have a Web server that was dedicated to the use of the space, to actually continue this open experimentation that we'd started in Obsolete but had to relatively tighten up in order to tend to commercial work. the whole idea of having a shell account and being able to do pretty much what you like was becoming more and more difficult.
It became more tricky to convince the others about, so it was inevitable that we had a completely separate box eventually that would house everything.
We had the idea of being a Web server, that was a platform for whatever creative activity occurred in the space, and obviously the space being a real physical location where that work could be demonstrated face-to-face with other people.

So an example would be...?

I guess from the earliest times a couple of the creators of the website put up some really simple but effective hooks, for which the idea was that it would give people an idea what was possible within this. The first one was like a message in a bottle, and the metaphor for the whole site being a waterway, and the notion that you're casting - at such an early point in the development of the Net - you're casting ideas into an ocean. OK, so let's take it the whole way and have a message in a bottle, which was a randomised retrieval of messages from a little database of text files. And a tiny, simple graphical interface of floating bottles, that you just clicked on one and got a different message. And you could equally as easily add your own.
And that's a vast untapped resource that we could go back to and rework again and again.
That work was quite quickly followed by work by people like Julie Myers, who was artist in residence with us, when she did an initial project called Peeping Tom which was a peek under our bedcovers and into our cupboards and drawers and a filch through her knickers, around her flat.
Obviously that was her work, but it was put into place by the collaboration of effort from some of the people working in the rooms who were interested. So that housed at Backspace, and that again set a tone.
One of the most long-term productive collisions happened in the space quite early on, was something called Ante with E, which was Heath's return to the space. It was a series of lectures that brought together his associates, his friends from around Europe, those people he'd met on some of these wayward travels, through the network of media centres, media labs across Europe. Not so much in the States, but certainly there was a smidgen of stateside involvement. Again this was very much a European thing that has been represented and was participated in these talks.
So there were mini conferences that were like a crush of individuals. The first one, I think, there were 25 speakers who all had six minutes each, with a minute in between to shuffle papers, and the next person was on, the idea being that in the day you can generate a level of excitement and amplitude well beyond that that can be extended over three days, and you leave people time to have a real chat which is what they're there for in any case.
Everyone brought food and it was very festive, particularly the first event was a very festive experience which went on and on and on I seem to remember, which was great.
The second and third had very different subjects. I can't remember the order of the subjects now, I'll have to look it up.

They were things like religion, Net politics...

What was the first one? Maybe it was just Net art, actually. So Hakim Bey came and talked, and we had all sorts of strange run-ins even on that evening. So the flush of a whole different group of people otherwise local to Backspace drew into it, drew even some of the peripheral art activists and the underground from around London who were curious, perturbed, annoyed and ??? come down and shout at the back and stuff. That was great. So we had people coming in from the great tradition of antagonism and activism in London. A lot of new people saw Backspace in that period who otherwise wouldn't have come along, obviously particularly those who had travelled from Europe who'd had some assistance to make the journey.
That was funded in part by the Arts Council, but it certainly wouldn't have happened without all the goodwill of the whole community to hold it in place and basically put everybody up. It was great. And then I suppose pretty much from the same time John even spoke at that, in the very first session of the Ante with E, which was a guy called John Haywood who does a project called Hayvend these days... one of his projects is called Hayvend, which is a series of vending machines that are in place in galleries and bars and social spots around town, and from these vending machines you can pick up a bite-sized piece of art for a pound that are individually packaged by the artist and supplied on a one-off or 20-off or 50-off basis, so you really are getting something odd, peculiar and obviously within the cost of a pound very often. So you gets what you paid for, but sometimes very much more and it's a quite exciting project.
And also it's going on and on and on, and has really grown in girth and capability, in terms of production and in terms of the other sort of projects that he's tackling now which stretch right out beyond that.
Like he did a CD, a 24-hour CD, of a day in his house. I think he recorded everything that happened throughout the course of a day, which was a sort of organised chaos of visits from his friends from all over the UK. And that was recorded into a QuickTime file that would only replay the actual time of day that you listened to it at.
So that's, again, locked in to the horror of that whole session. If you listen back to it, there are some quite painful moments in it where either nothing's happening or there's the ongoing explanation of the process to everyone coming through. It's kind of fascinating.