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This site archives 16 digital works that I made between 1998 and 2006. The projects include large-scale Virtual Reality works, e-says and events that mixed digital elements and performance. These are artworks that existed before the iPhone, social media or the App Store, in an online environment that we wouldn't recognise today – download times were slow, the colours occasionally coherent and the potential for failure very high. Despite these variables (or because of them) the digital world presented me with a good space in which to experiment. The early works were working at the limits of what was possible – the Internet was a functional, simple but limited system. This was a world pre-Coca-Cola, pre-easyJet, a place of risk; the edge of what was possible at the time. What is really noticeable is a widescreen optimism to the work, an uncynical attitude that seems so foreign nowadays. In 2007 I moved my practice into book production, outputting How To Be An Artist in 2009 and returned to making technology projects with ESPELIDES in 2018, picking up where I had left off, a gap of around 12 years, after which my motivation for generating ideas was very different (and the media landscape had similarly transformed). Many of these works are concerned with the technology of the early online experience – the perennial slowness, the nighttime bubble, the UX, the endlessness of digital information. Parallel to this concept is the idea of interiority, the evolving self, intimacy, the essentialness of things. Also, the landscape is a very subliminal, but effective presence here, often tied to the notion of the sublime, that volume of nature presented to the viewer in inchoate form. In .sciis (2001) I link it to the colorfield paintings of Barnett Newman and it emerges again in dusk (2006–7) as a brooding, pulsing circle of dark grey on the screen, an audio visualisation recorded in central London at the crepuscular hour. Before I came to the computer as a vehicle, I had worked as a performance artist, and this sense of holding the space, being mindful of time, describing actions and understanding the needs of an audience, is a strong feature of the work. As I have moved into systems development, post–2006 (with card box 210CARDS (2013), app OMETHR (2020), bot UWRMA (2020) and online projects DIVERGENT PROCEDURES (2023–4), SYSTEMATIC PROPHETICS (2025-6)) I realise that these performative elements are central to my practice; building modular environments where people can access their individual imaginations – these are important tenets of my work. In uploading these older artworks I have tried not to engineer them too much for the modern world so parts of the sites will sometimes not cohere or may be low resolution. Yet, with most of the pieces (where data existed), I have made an additional remix or assembled archive images to fill out the material available. One of the issues behind the reconstitution of my digital work from this period is that all these pieces were made landscape (horizontal), often involving long, extended right-hand scrolling, whereas after 2007 (the post-iPhone era) nearly all visual material is viewed portrait (vertical), a complete overturning of the previous format. This simple flip has made it challenging to show the existing works in their original formats. In remixing for the modern iPhone audience, something inevitably is lost (time)…and gained (easy of use). The fast-paced journey of technology means that even works created twenty years ago don’t have the systems to view and support them. These older softwares stand as a shadow form behind the works archived here, a version of events which is parallel but invisible. 'Large blocks of colour dissolving' indeed. This is noticeable with my two Virtual Reality pieces .sciis (2001) and iamme (2003) which have disappeared from online – Shockwave Player, the plugin that supported iamme, ended on 4/2019, Cortona VRML that performed similar function for .sciis ended on 1/2015. I’m sanguine about the pace of change (after all, we are only passing through). This website merely fixes the image (as a photographer might) in the liquid of the developer, to be seen bright for a moment after 20 years. It's likely that in another 20, URLs will not exist. Again, it's the notion of ephemeral performance. Not everything can (or should) be saved. A lot of my 90s work was made using the Sony Cyber-shot DSC-F1, a very early digital camera, the first to be released in the UK, quite beautiful in design but limited in capacity. It has no memory card and is confined to only 59 photos. So if I was travelling or going on trips to make work, I had to self-edit, to keep to my 59, to reduce my output to a minimum. This meant that I had to make really good, very considered choices of what photographs to take. Nowadays I have an iPhone and I have potentially thousands of choices (and ironically I never look at the images). I often think about limits as a way of generating ideas – deliberately creating systems for myself that reduce the possibilities. Not endless options but a tight framework that can force something happen, to break through my inertia (of endless choice). I miss the power of the ephemeral, the disappearing event that allows me be fully alive to the present moment. Disappearance that forces us to experience loss and failure, or deficit, is something that we avoid in the digital world. Perhaps, after all, it’s just a shrinking from death – keeping the plates spinning so that we don’t have to admit that we are creatures living on a physical plane? I was using these early Sony cameras more as a visual anchor, a snap recording of an ephemeral event, in a similar way to Polaroid cameras or Super 8. There was no sense of developing quality or pursuing pixels – making something commercial, to be sold, was far from my mind. During the archiving process, I discovered that many images were stored at a small file size to aid download online (storage and backup was a continual problem in the 90s and 00s). Many works were also archived on zip drives; expensive and inflexible. In some cases we have digitally enhanced photographs to return them to an original state, but others were too pixellated to bring back from digital death Several of these works use lower case text and are very casually punctuated. By these methods I was consciously aligning myself with Brazilian Concrete Poetry from the 50s and 60s; breaking the line, the hierarchy of the sentence. Many of the elisions or jumps in page order were deliberate devices (known by me at the time) to disorder the senses of the reader. In order to preserve the authenticity of my 90s voice I have accurately duplicated this format here in the originals. Post–2009, and with the more commercial drive of my books How To Be An Artist and 12 Rules of Creativity in place (moving away from the avant-garde), I started to follow a more conventional language rule-set. In the modem remixes of the e-says, I've largely stayed unpunctuated, but I have used upper case text for proper nouns and replaced with normal grammar where the sense was previously compromised. These were not easy decisions to make: each e-say has its own energy, its own drive. By 2011 I had removed all these 16 digital works (assembled here) from the Internet; I didn’t believe that there was a place for these older, experimental pieces. The sheen offered by the iPhone swept all before it and the rapid commercialisation it ushered in didn’t resonate with me. It was my return to digital projects in 2018 (ironically on Apple’s AppStore) with ESPELIDES, and a later encounter in 2024 with curator Jean Féline (who had seen the e-says previously online) that convinced me that there was merit in exhibiting these older works. The journey that I have gone on to present these pieces has been complex, zigzagging, challenging but I am glad that I have attempted it. There is an uncomplicated optimism in these 90s ideas, a sense of the world opening up, a community of practitioners, an idealism that connects me with my younger days, a lightness of belief that is enviable.