The funny thing is that net artists are more vocal and..... aggressive about purity of the art than you find in coming out of a fine art background, which I did, its quiet strange, cause you think with this "global freedom of the medium", you wont get that, but you get it more, you do, and it's echoed by the institutions. If you look at Walker and the Tate you get "this is net art, this is what net art is about, this interactivity - its about play, its about surveillance, its about.....bluhaaha...this is what it is about. They are boxing it already and the thing's hardly walking yet. I have this thing about boxes, I don't like them. So I am gonna stay out there for as long as a can.

I think that one finds in history that people who have been excluded become very fundamentalist.

You do have to fight your corner, I learned that: I tried to get into rhizome, I was talking to them, I was putting up lots of posts and I was saying, "what do you think about this" and they were definitely ignored for a long time. Definitely. I put all these posts up and I had no response. And when I replied to a post I got no response, I was trying to find my way in and find what they were talking about and then I put up this Wendy Coke poem, called "men and their boring arguments", and that's how I met Marc from furtherfield - who wrote back, saying "yes we can be like that, sorry about that, you can get a bit of testosterone here and bear with it". But after that it broke open, it was ever so funny, you know it took humour and poetry to get them to listen, maybe that was a lesson.

Wow, I had not realised that anybody with something to say would be ignored - gosh I am surprised.

It can be, what you find, is people put this very nice enquiries at first and they say the odd thing, and than they get more aggressive, and then someone will respond to them, and then they settle down, but rhizome is a bit, raw, because everything goes and it can be a lot of.....The people on it know each other really well and there is a bit of bunter going on. It can be a bit hard and it can be a bit of an old boys' club.

A bit like institutions replicating themselves. You could wonder if anything that is organised and focused becomes alike institutions as we know them, it is worrying - because its handy to have a portal or a filter where you have some sense of quality and values in there, you don't want to spend hours and hours going through loads of private sites.

If you put people in one place eventually the management comes about and in some ways, it has to happen.

There should be something like a self-destructive organisation.

Exactly, I have not been around long enough to see if these organisations are capable of re-organising themselves, some are, so.... Hopefully because so many people are coming and going it will.

One of the positive aspects of the net-art scene, that is very often mentioned, is that everybody's art can be seen, from your experience that is not necessary so.

Providing you know where to be seen; the capability is there, but you do have to work hard and you need to be much more theoretically aware than I thought. I always quiet liked theory but you need to argue a corner, not just from a personal perspective, but on a global stage, you HAVE to know, you need to know how to get your work seen, because the main net art portals are closed, the museums and institutions are closed, you can't link to them, you can't branch off them. No they have to choose you, you are chosen. At the same time, there are possibilities around that, providing you are prepared to keep talking.