Most of the life span of Backspace saw you being fiercely independent of funding of that kind, corporate and public funding. Was it important, was it key to the way you operate, staying clear of that, those kinds of attachments and commitments?

It sounds kind of contradictory because we initially funded, I suppose, the opening of the space, and we set the sense of it with a little bit of money.
But even right from the beginning it was about something else, and all the initial equipment was the residue of the computing tech that we'd been using upstairs that frankly wasn't really up to the job any more. So broken scanners and crappy PCs and tired Macs. Except maybe to the outside it looked like we had some money to put in but they were genuinely the things that were being left to one side as everyone tried to upgrade upstairs.

These issues of computer usage were illustrated very well by James from Redundant Technology Initiative, and he was involved quite early, as he was talking at one of these Ante with E talks I think, but certainly we kept in touch all the time.
It fitted very well with his argument that there is life left in all technology, it's just a question of your approach and your interest in manipulating those as tools rather than looking at them as landfill.

And the whole of the space was constructed out of found materials, and although there wasn't a tight budget, there really wasn't one at all, but when things needed to be paid for they were, like the people who had worked on the actual construction of the room got paid, not least of all because it was done by a guy called Tim Cook who was a fabulous artist and I was more than happy to accommodate him.

He lived in the space for the first six months, pretty much, while we were doing it. So there were all sorts of deeply seated social weaving going throughout the whole nature of the setting of it, which I think carried it forward quite a long way before it had one of its inevitable failures along the path!

So Backspace as real space is no longer with us?

It's been said by a few people, Backspace died a few times in the term of its existence.
It certainly came to a very abrupt end when the whole building was cleared, and that was everybody: commercial businesses and maverick social centres, all out at the same time at the very end of the century, the very end of 1999! Which was quite nice, to look back at that and have such a nice closure, or have such a rounded closure to the end of the century or the decade or whatever.

We had a great big party which kind of sealed its fate in some ways, I supposed, because the characters that took over that building after that day stayed there for a few months without permission. Which was fine by me. I think they made some good use of it.

In fact, their raw approach to using the space taught everyone a rather late lesson in terms of what we could have really achieved more collectively across the whole building than we even attempted ever.
Even the few months before I actually enacted one of my long- term wishes which was to have an outdoor film festival in the square there which somehow always got overlooked. I did that in November and then the thing got closed at Christmas. Both events were top notch, and really quite amusing and challenging for everybody.

You mention the use of film and video. Do you think that people can adopt that approach you took with Backspace of working independently, and operate in that way using those other types of media? Do you think there are new technologies, for example, that maybe you experimented with on the Backspace server that could be of benefit to other types of media production?

Yeah. If you take an open and spontaneous approach to whatever... well, all the material that's around you, whether that's what you could consider constructive compliment or distracting obstacle. They all form the ground work for an opportunity, and if that means that you're an avid film maker and you haven't got a budget for your 35 mil film or whatever, then you should really persist with the idea of film making and adopt whatever appropriate means you can get your hands on in order to actually go through with the idea, because without that you put off that moment of discovery, as to whether what you had in mind had some validity anyway.

I think it's been proved over and over again, even rather cornily with things like The Blair Witch and stuff, that it is possible to actually cross right over with very minimal equipment. And OK, you can say that DV cameras isn't exactly minimal, but it's been done many times before and will be again with cans on string.

The technological race isn't something that you need to enter into if you actually have a creative idea, and I suppose that is something that I've always tried to hold as open as possible when dealing with the sort of content that ended up in Backspace on the site, and the way the room was used - to my mind, not half as crazily as I'd have liked to have imagined using it myself, had I come across it and somebody else was operating it.

Obviously these are things you can't really fully explore when you're in the centre of the stew. Very often that way you want to see is a bit of quiet in order to actually think about what's happening, and be in a position to ask questions like these. And it's taken me a year to really let it boil down enough to actually be able to describe it. And the good thing about that is it has given me quite a good vocabulary to somehow describe the things that we're up to now, which relate very strongly to all of us.

There are projects like Volcano which used the streaming media technologies

Yeah. Obviously we used the Web server as something that... there's 150 sites there, and of that many of the groups involved have had specialist interests. Some I've been more able to feed and nurture than others, and certainly the film and video thing is something that I started out wanting to do: the notion of a global telecom network that could potentially be a form of distribution for underground film and video, something that was right up there in the front of my mind when I first started, in the beginning of Obsolete.

In fact, prior to Obsolete I worked with Exploding Cinema to try and build a collection of film and video we could actually put out on a regular basis. In fact, the very first issue didn't materialise until two years after I first went to the Exploding Cinema, which kind of bridged right across the start of Backspace and right across the start of Obsolete and into Backspace. And it wasn't till '96 or '97 that we managed to get the first compilation video out, called Vacuum, and the experience of that was just a conformation of our worst fear, that there isn't any possible way of really distributing independent video unless you actually hand it out yourself. Which is possibly the position it'll always be in, I think.