With the Backspace Web site, there are many project on there, a really diverse range of projects from art projects to music projects, activist projects. Do you have any control, is there an editorial policy determining what goes on in that Web site?

No, not really at all. I guess these things are determined by those users' proximity to the gateways to access.
So when Backspace was open, coming and using the space meant that you got access to all of those facilities and you could organise that to happen remotely if you were elsewhere, if you had a streaming project, if you were at a location and you were trying to cover an event, or you were bringing material from an event into the space, all those things were appropriate uses of the shared facilities there.
And you could patchwork up your own solution to suit, and the idea of the space being attended was more to facilitate that than anything else.

Very often it would be a case of everyone sitting around trying to work out how to do it, or once we'd started actually concentrating on some of the radio and the streaming media issues, and once we'd started radio space it was a question of putting that provision into the hands of people who would use it, even to the point of actually going places and installing.

For instance Gio (Giovanni D'Angelo) visited some of the local kids who wanted to do pirate radio, but obviously were pinned back by their parents or by the knowledge that somehow they'd get in big trouble if they put a real transmitter up. If they had used their home computer somehow they could stream their sounds up and we'd reflect it quite happily.
So that was a bit of outreach work that Gio used to do, and I used to do it as well. Just literally setting people up so they could actually participate and use the facilities.

The idea was that everyone was contributing, helping to cover these delegated costs for running the space, but in terms of the server and in terms of streaming the media from my point of view the more use we could put it all to the better it would all look and the better it would function and further the message of shared facilities would reach.
I was always as encouraging as possible to those ends. So in terms of the building we were in, which was populated by many different groups, with quite a lot involved with media and certainly music being the shared interest.

It wasn't long, well it was longer than it should have been, but it wasn't too bad. Within a year or so we were doing events in different rooms in the building, primarily at the Space Lab, which was the Coldcut workshop. That space was also used as the finishing production basis for the coverage of the June 18 carnival against capitalism, which was in the summer of '99. And we used Backspace as a collection point for the video and audio and telephone, phone in coverage of the event as it was happening. So we had this real time flow of video coming via bike from the city as things went off, right from the morning, from the critical mass bike ride, right the way through to the difficulties at the end of the day, were all monitored by individuals at the event and those tapes were passed back to the space and we filtered them through our system and protected the innocent and explained the story in the various ways we could, with the resources that we had.
So in terms of June 18 we had the stream running all day, but we pretty much saturated our facilities and it was, as far as we could tell, the only independent coverage of the event which was visible other than the TV coverage which was going on.

Obviously a lot of photography work was being done and a huge amount of material has been gathered and presented since then, which was conclusive evidence of the balanced nature of the day, in actual fact, despite appearances to the contrary.

So this seemed like one of the best examples of use of that space.

For me, when I was approached by members of Reclaim The Streets who wanted to come and join Backspace and actually start using the facilities I thought 'this is going to be a really good demonstrating of what all this cumulative effort can represent in terms of a solution'. Not that I wanted to get into just particularly covering civil action or direct action. As a method of communicating what was possible it opened some doors very wide and explained things that possibly had been overlooked quite a lot before: the idea that you could use it as a project space, provided you co-operated and collaborated with those who were also using the space.
Consideration, but a consensus within the space to actually act in a certain way was enough to actually allow things to go on. That would be quite a disturbance to other users, but in terms of long-term benefit to everybody of interest. So great, you know.

So a lot of the techniques that were applied during that day were learnt by artists using that space or that technology, or musicians using that space and that technology?

Yeah, I mean it mirrored the work that had been going on, in terms of the radio project.
I guess what all these things have in common in terms of tech is that they all need a method of reflecting or duplicating the stream of information so that more than one person can get it, and that's something that Backspace offered in terms of the Radiospace project. So we've got officially a 25 user free licence for the realmedia stream, and have got our server on a bit of bandwidth that allows us to go well beyond that.

Now from time to time we borrow licences to enable us to rise that figure all the way up to the capacity of the bandwidth, which is considerable, so I think the most we've ever had is 350 people connected at one point, and as proof of what is possible kind of puts paid to a lot of the claims of how many people regularly connect to these streams, because on a purely financial basis that would make it very difficult to have more than a thousand people. That's like a 30 megabit connection to the Internet, which God knows how much that costs, even today. Too much for normal folk, and more than even corporate companies are willing to spend without any considerable return. Of course, it's very hard to get a return off a bit of free media like that.

One of the things I was really keen on having happen at the end of our time in Winchester Wharf was that people would actually continue using this resource remotely, and to my delight it was really taken up by not only the Coldcut crew, who were doing the regular Wednesday night sessions in the wharf, but that's now expanded to a seven-day-a-week radio and streaming video session actually being constructed from all over the UK, and carried through their own gateway, their own interface which is piratetv.net. I was talking to them last night, and the breadth of the content they're actually dealing with is such that it brings in as much of the independent media, as much of the direct action coverage as the work we touched on in Backspace during J18, so they have an ongoing relationship and responsibility with Undercurrents, who are independent documentary makers.

They've been around for a long long time, and they're still pretty active in actually co-ordinating, training people in using video cameras, which of course is fundamental and absent in the community otherwise. And now that's plugged in to a practical output, a reasonable place where people can see their videos make their way into the public domain and off the shelves.