Q: how did I/O/D (http://www.backspace.org/iod) get together? why?

We were all at art college together, and had separate interests and ways
of working. But we were the only students who wanted to find ways to use
computer technology in our work. I can remember Matt (Matthew Fuller)
and I making some attempts to get an interactive 'zine together. We'd
been talking about the possibilities for a few years. We figured that
Matt had enough ways of hooking into a roster of independent publishers
and writers, and I had the skills to design and produce something for
the Macintosh. Around this time we were looking at publications such as
Jamie Levy's "Electronic Hollywood" and recognizing the potential to
distribute something on floppy disk. It seemed like a good, if arbitrary
limit to the amount of data we would publish. We didn't consider the Web
as a distribution medium at this time, although the fledgling art
bulletin board scene in the UK was close at hand for us, Matt having
been one of the consortium to set-up "Fast Breeder."

In 1993 I started working professionally with Colin (Colin Green). I'd
been invited to establish a production unit in a Museums' Zoology
Department, and we were making point-of-information interactives for
their public galleries. One of our clients had bought us a
PowerMacintosh–as it happens, one of the first to arrive in the UK, so
we had all this new equipment and plenty of energy, and a desire to
continue our art practices through this medium…

Pretty soon the three of us were pushing ideas around for the first
I/O/D. I/O/D was chosen as a moniker to mean everything and nothing. As
well as being an acronym for "the Institute of Directors" in the UK and
being a refuse disposal company in East London, it could mean "in our
dreams," "it's on disk"; or whatever…

We took maybe two or three months to produce the publication in our
spare time. We launched at an event at the ICA in London. We'd bought a
hundred or so reject floppy disks from a mass-duplication plant (who had
less rigourous testing standards than us), copied each disk manually and
stuck labels on them so they were ready for free distribution. This idea
was important for us. We've always been suspicious of any "pay-per-view"
tendencies. For next to no money we'd pushed I/O/D out there and proved
that it could be done. This was during a time when others were still
fretting over their Arts Council grant forms, or waiting for the release
of the next version of Director before they could start their killer
"multimedia" projects…

Q: How did you get interested in coding software? What is cool about it?

We've only recently come to describe ourselves as "software designers."
We still realize that in terms of the software industry, we're using
pretty cranky development tools rooted, as we are, in the multimedia
boom of the early nineties. As a production unit, Colin and I have
operated as "Escape" and other guises for around seven years. During
that time we've seen a shift in our work from content production, which
was seen as the logical job-opportunity for Fine Art graduates by people
like Roy Ascott, to designing software tools and production processes.

We set out to redefine our role in the industry with both I/O/D 4 and
our commercial work. We were disgusted by the way many "multimedia"
practitioners felt that they should aid the process of recuperation,
selling the smell of art or "rave culture" to large corporations by
making (as we're so fond of saying) "a collage of urban breakbeats."

It's also deadening to think that your professional life will consist of
manipulating existing material, ad infinitum, just so as to illustrate
some post-structuralist theory that justifies a lack of engagement with
the consequences of the work that you produce.

We certainly had the means to write some of the best Lingo scripting
around (credit goes to Colin here), and our practice had become a kind
of exploration of materials, contexts and possibilities, so we began to
make work which helped us with this process. Our work now has to deal
with code as much as anything else, its being one of the raw materials
we use, with its own particular qualities and subtleties that need
attending to.

Q: What other kinds of work do you do?

I/O/D is really a collaboration between Escape and Matthew Fuller. Matt
continues to write, moderate Nettime and work on other independent media
projects (the forthcoming Nettime Book launch in London for example).
Escape takes care of business, helping to provide the resources for
I/O/D to survive through making commercial software of sorts.

We are only now being commissioned to make commercial work which we
consider to be on par with I/O/D…

Q: In your work you use the internet as data–did you ever do work that
was confined within the interface?

"The Web Stalker" was our first project for the Web, but previous issues
of I/O/D have concerned themselves more with interface and content.
There's been a shift in the way that we think about work over the years.
I guess that back when we started, GUI was a big deal. For us, having
started out using the Macintosh, we were trapped within the desktop
metaphor and certainly issues One and Two of I/O/D tried to push new
types of interaction beyond those conventions.

Until quite recently I'd thought that the industry's shift in focus from
CD-ROM to the Web was about nothing more than distribution. In some ways
the production environment for the two are very similar to, in some
cases, identical development software being used. In making I/O/D 4 it
became more obvious that to deal with near infinite, distributed data
was at odds with the way the industry had thought about PCs and CD-ROMs
in which everything is "owned" by a single, isolated machine. This
probably sounds totally obvious, but it felt like a radical shift in the
way that we work.

Coping with data that has a life of its own, which can't be tamed in the
old ways, has presented new challenges to us. We still make our work for
Macintosh and Windows operating systems, but we obviously sense a
certain urgency that we should move into systems that are more at home
in a distributed, networked environment.

Q: do you consider your work political? politically correct?

I/O/D has always been a fly in the ointment to some extent. I think that
we're considered as marginal in the London "new media" scene which
spends its time pretending to make artwork while doing the dirty work
for ad agencies. I know that we've tried to put together a sustainable
practice which works alongside commercial work, and we've tried to stay
away from commercial work which would make I/O/D difficult to continue.
"The Web Stalker" was a political intervention into the software
industry in that we have shown that with some energy and spare time you
can make an application which rivals some of the projects funded by
multinational software corporations. Have a look at the
"cybergeographies" website to see a collection of R&D projects that must
have been funded to the hilt and compare them to I/O/D 4. We've tried to
expand upon this idea of "software as culture" (see
http://www.backspace.org/iod/mutation.html) and to break through some of
the assumptions made by mainstream software developers. When operating
systems are described as being natural resources, alarm bells should
ring.