I've been doing Web/net.art since 1995, um, so I was 35 or 36 when I started. You wouldn't know it from what I just said, but before that, in 1983, I graduated from the University of Victoria with a degree in English and Math

Then I did a radio show for six years that concentrated on literature, audio writing, and sound poetry. A couple of those shows and some sound poetry from that time are at vispo.com/audio . Then around

. 1990 I went back to school to study Computer Science and Math. I was also playing drums in a groove band called The Laughing Boot Quintet and publishing poetry and criticism in the little magazines. During that time, I also published a literary magazine called And Yet. We did that using PageMaker 2.0 or something.

That's when I started doing visual poetry using CorelDraw and working to gray-scale because that's the printing technology I had. But I was dissatisfied with publishing a magazine: it was expensive and I could only publish local writers. I enjoyed publishing local writers, but I wanted to be in touch with writers around the world. I did three years of study of Computer Science and Math, and then became a freelance writer/programmer. I also started a live reading series in Victoria BC Canada called Mocambopo (which is still happening), where I have lived most of my life. That was fun on Fridays every week.

I got an Internet connection in 95 and started browsing the Web. It seemed like God's little toenail had dropped into my lap. Here was a medium where I could combine text, image, sound, and programming, combine all the things I've worked on for many years, and be in touch with artists around the world.

Thank you Regina! My setup for my work is only slightly out of the ordinary. I have a better-than-usual-for-computers microphone and a microphone stand, and my stereo is hooked up to my computer, so I can listen to audio through my stereo's speakers and input cassette and radio into the computer. And I have a good set of headphones.

The software I use is Cakewalk and Sound Forge, and a little bit of Acid sometimes. Cakewalk is a multi-track digital recording studio. I use it for recording work that is multi-tracked, and for mixing down. I used this in Nio and Oppen Do Down. Each of the sounds in Nio and Oppen Do Down is the same length. So I would record multiple tracks at once: I'd turn on the microphone and recorder and listen to the sound loop through the headset, and do multiple takes of the track I was trying to do, and then stop the recording, listen back, and take the best cut or combine several cuts. So I'd end up with about a hundred tracks, and then mixed them down to about 16 sounds. Each of the sounds in Nio has several tracks on it. Same with most of the tracks in Oppen Do Down.

All my work so far has just been voice and sometimes some finger snapping. So I don't need a sophisticated recording studio as you do if you want to record a band, for instance. I use Sound Forge for recording work that isn't going to be multi-tracked, and I use Sound Forge for editing audio.

When I worked in radio, I cut up a lot of reel-to-reel tape with a razor blade. And worked in an analog sound studio at the radio station that was functionally very similar to what I have now basically on my computer. And the computer is actually much better than the $100,000 studio! The sound effects are broader. The process of editing audio is better in digital in the same way that editing writing on a word processor is better than a typewriter. You can see the waveform and 'bookmark' parts of it, so you can find stuff within a long sound quickly. And the analog studio just had a 4-track reel-to-reel whereas you can have as many tracks as your computer can handle (a question of RAM) in the digital.

My six year radio experience from the eighties educated my ears and my mind concerning not only how to record and edit and mix sound, but also educated me about voice, and the phenomenology of disembodied sound, and performance. I learned to use my voice expressively, and learned how then chopping up the recording can make it more expressive. My radio show broadcasted sound poetry, audio writing, and interviews with writers and sound artists. So I learned from them, also.

Basically I learned a kind of writing on air, the inscription and composition of sound. This all transferred naturally to the digital. We learn in the digital also similar skills and approaches to the image. And to text. And how to combine them all, a sense of multimedia composition.

For images I use Photoshop, CorelPaint, and CorelDraw. Photoshop and CorelPaint are quite similar--they're both bitmap programs, but CorelPaint has some wonderful pens that allow you to put images on the nib, as many as you like, and draw with images. CorelDraw is like Illustrator, a vector-based image-making piece of software that I've been using for years which is made in Canada. I also have a lot of Photoshop filters--my favorite bunch of filters is Kai's Power Tools 3.

When I first started on the Web, I was doing work like you see at Ã, Ê, Î, and Ô.The process usually involved taking a visually poetical idea and then working it in these programs. Sometimes my experimentation with these programs would lead me into seeing that you could do x, y, and z with them, and then I'd think, well, there's some poetical possibility there, now what is it? So this would be a case of the possibilities of the software suggesting futher work. But I tried to avoid just doing stuff that you'd look at and say, "Oh that's so Photoshop". Concept and meaning must be allowed to emerge, however, or change, during the course of composition. If we just hammer out a fixed idea that we had at the beginning, it usually is dull. So much happens during the course of composition, as in writing, too.

Most of my image work is with letters and words. Most of it is lettristic, deals with letters, rather than words. Letters are more fun to work with visually; the form of letters is more interesting than the form of words, visually. You can generally make better visual art with letters than you can with words or sentences or paragraphs, or I can, anyway. Letters have more individual character than words, visually. Letters and phonemes are also close to song and voice of sound poetry. Letters also animate more fluidly than words, you can move them around more elegantly on a monitor via animation than you can words or sentences and paragraphs because they have fewer key points to move. Also, to have the meaning emerge through the letter can give rise to a kind of microscopic or atomic poetry, a poetry that zooms in on language past the scale of the quotidian down, sometimes, into where language turns into primal energy and sound poetry.

After working this way for several years, I encountered the Lettristes. Their work is pre-digital, for the most part. So of course it is not an approach that is unique to me.

Zooming out to multimedia, the tools I use there are Director and Flash these days, primarily. Though in the past I have used DHTML, Java, Delphi, and Visual Basic. I am very fond of the writings of the Pre-Socratic philosophers. In their time, there was less distance between poetry and philosophy than there is now. I do feel that the multimedia work of synthesizing different media and arts, and also synthesizing those with programming, science, and technology is, in part, an attempt to think in other ways using broader language than the written.

I don't think I could summarize each work from 1995, Regina, because there have been too many. But certain things have stayed the same with me and other things have changed since then.

I still seek to understand the social and artistic possibilities of electronic media and technology. Whenever I learn a new command or form or piece of technology, I try to figure out some of the artistic possibilities of it. Like when I learned a bit about HTML forms back in 95 or 96, I did the pop-up poems. These attempt to explore the place of poetry in this odd environment for poetry.

Later on, in 1997, I started doing DHTML work. The first piece I did in DHTML relates to the pop-up poems. It's a piece called Seattle Drift. It relates in that, as with the pop-up poems, the text is the character in the poem. Since about 1999 I have been using Flash+Director. But you can see that Enigma n, which is an earlier DHTML piece, relates strongly to Enigma n². The "material" of both of these pieces is the word "meaning". Both of them attempt to explore how poetic meaning can be conveyed in ways other than the usual bunch of words strung together on paper.

While the technologies I have used, over time, have changed and progressed, and while I hope I have grown as an artist, many of the questions and issues that interested me back in 1995 still interest me now. Like how to help build a network of digital artists and audience that is operative world-wide and is of real solidarity and beauty. Which we are involved in together, Regina!

First, let me thank you for all your work in translating my essay and also Arteroids itself into Portuguese, Regina, and for publishing Arteroids 2.02 on your site! And also many thanks to your friend Carmen Penido for her work on translating the essay. That's a long essay and I understand that you both worked a great deal on it. The joy of a writer at being translated is considerable and odd. I am very grateful.

Concerning Arteroids, I have worked on games and puzzles before. There is some work on vispo.com from the mid nineties. And I collaborated with a friend of mine, Dr. Mike Fellows, a brilliant Mathematician/Computer Scientist on some puzzle designs in the mid nineties. So Arteroids is, in a sense, a continuation of that work, but that work was not involved in poetry, for instance, or with audio, and is a bit less ambitious than Arteroids in some senses.

I call it 'the battle of poetry against itself and the forces of dullness'. Poetry is forever pounding on the door of the unsaid, forever battling against its own limitations, forever growing and going where it has not been before, forever expanding the range of poetry into the unknown and the unsaid, forever rescuing itself from dullness, forever deeply alive and in motion, forever loving. That is the battle of poetry.

My favorite games as a kid and teenager were table hockey, playing sports (I was a goalie in hockey and football), track (I was a sprinter), Scrabble, Yahtze, Risk, Monopoly, Canasta, Battling Tops, Mousetrap, Chess, Billiards, Frisbee, and many more.

As I developed the game, I thought of things that I wanted to put in it that were fun or interesting but weren't appropriate to a competitive game. For instance, the ability to change the velocity, density, and friction are fun and interesting in Play Mode, but in a game, you 'play with the cards you are dealt' rather than being able to choose the cards you play with. That is part of the challenge of a competitive game.

I wanted to make Arteroids a fun competitive game, but I also wanted to explore the similarities and differences between things like art, play, games, and poetry. So having a Game Mode and Play Mode arose out of trying to make the piece as fun and interesting as I could make it.