KEY
Bold:	Interviewer
Italic:	Camera/sound Operator
Regular:	Respondent
[ ]:	Uncertain word(s)

Okay, so the recorder is going.  Could you say your name and spell it for me, please?
Yeah.  So it's [anon].
Cool.  And just to confirm for the recording, have you given your consent to this interview?
Yes.
Excellent.  Thank you very much.  So I've talked a little bit about what the project is all about, so now we just want to get some of your answers.  So, can you tell me what your job is?  What do you do?
I call myself an artist and what that practically involves is making work which tours.  And that work is electronic music, using games engines to make virtual reality installations, performances, websites.  Basically, making story content across multiple platforms.
Yeah, so it's kind of transmedia.
Yeah.
Yeah, is the crude term that is applied to it.
Yeah.
Are there any other terms that you prefer for all this?
No.  I think, ultimately, I'd like there to be no term, or no need for it, but that's totally impractical.  The terms are always crude, and so you're always trying to—  In a way, when I'm talking about what I do, it's using the term and then breaking it down and maybe redefining for people what that might mean now.
Yeah.  So can you tell me a little bit about your background?  How did you get to be using all this different technology and media and games ideas?  How did you reach this point in your career?
I think that it can be traced back purely and simply to the kind of punk ethic that came out of, for me – I'm too young for punk – but out of the DIY culture of the rave scene and the idea that you can create something on your own.
So when I was making music, it would be on my own, mostly.  I was in bands, but also I was doing things on my own, and there's a real power to that.  And so then when it came to film, I got involved in film when the technology became accessible and we could just about make it.  We could make a film a week and we could keep doing that and showing them to people, holding our own screenings rather than trying to even pretend that we were going to have a career at the BBC or anything like that.  So uninteresting and boring to us.  And when I say us, I really mean the scene of people who were involved in that kind of thing.
We had our scene, which was very irreverent, but very serious.  We were very serious about what we did.  But obviously what's happened in the interim is the internet has come along and democratised everything, including free games engines for making it work.  So where I've come from really is DIY culture and feeling like it's okay and there is a valid reason for me to pose my questions to the world and put them up for discussion.
So what led you to the games engine stuff?  What question was that answering for you that you didn't have from film, for example?
Very, very specifically, I had a piece of work that was at the Tate Modern in 2011, which was using video goggles to make a form of VR.  But the big problem was – I mean, it wasn't really a problem, audiences loved it – but what I could see from repeating the show over and over again several thousand times all over the world is that it was giving an impression that you had agency, and you didn't.  And what Occulus and, for me, the DK2 when that came along and you had the tracker and you had Unity becoming free, what that did was enable me to make interactive works which the audience have agency within.
Yeah.  Who's your audience?
It's changing.  So if you were asking me that six years ago, I would've said it would be the experimental theatre crowd and the music crowd and the kind of indie film crowd, the video art, which are all very small and they're small and diminishing.  
And so what I'm recognising is that, as my work is being featured now at digital culture festivals, gaming festivals, electronic music festivals and, at the same time, those festivals are all expanding their remit to include a much broader interpretation of what their core aim is, that actually the playfulness that I talked about in my presentation here is becoming mainstream.
So I'm sort of interested in reaching people now who are—  I can get online, so I have a much bigger audience online than I do in real life.  Part of the plan now is to try and make it so that I can take the work to them in real—  Hence, Mexico.  A much bigger audience in Mexico than in the UK online.  If I put up a 360 video, I get 120,000 hits in ten days, no problem.  In the UK, it'll get nowhere near that.  And I have an international touring background, so therefore I can imagine making something which people can access online, making that interaction much more meaningful, and then following up with shows which they can come and see.
The kind of self-made punk ethic of this, do you think this is a common background for people who are exploring these kinds of games, art, interaction theatre boundary? 
There's definitely people out there and it's a curious community because—  I can only really speak about the UK that I know really, really well, although I've met people doing this outside.  
The problem then is always how do you break through to get an audience because there's a little bit of a I'll-rub-your-back-and-you-rub-mine with funding, for example.  If they fund you, they want you to be a success, and so they'll talk about you as if you're the best thing since sliced bread, whether you are or your aren't.  And so a lot of people that I know working in this area who come from DIY are almost allergic to getting funding.  You start talking through the process and you can see them cringing.  There's a purest element where – someone put it to me – funded means fun dead, like they're going to kill your work.
So it's a curious area, which is why I think the more we facilitate the distribution of work online with things like Steam and Spotify, or whatever it might be, then those people will come out of the wood.  I mean, in a connected world, a small audience can be quite big.
Yeah.  What is it you think about the funding process which—?  Is it purely just that kind of framing of all people who are funded are successful, like an allergy to looking at funding as a failure or the option for failure within funding as being a problem, or is it some part of the process that—?
I think it's both.
Both, okay.
I think that people see the work and go, "That is utterly shit.  That is utterly shit.  How come they just got twenty grand to do that?  It's utterly pants.  It's awful."  
I saw something recently – it's actually made by somebody I know – and I looked at it and thought, it's embarrassing.  It's virtually Morris Dancing to most people.  Most people are going to walk passed that and go, "What the fuck are they doing?  What are they doing?"  It means nothing to anybody.  On the other hand, I've had conversations with people where they just want to work away.  They just want to make it, they don't want to have to go through convincing anybody else, and I totally understand that.
I think there's an additional problem, and that is that it isn't 1960 any more.  So these art forms that we're using weren't there a year ago.  We're not in a modernist era where there's a correct way to do things and you're a painter and you're either a good one or a bad one.  We're working with things that are evolving at a very rapid rate.  So the people who might decide whether you get the funding or not probably have no idea what they're talking about.
Yeah, yeah, that is a significant problem.  I also agree on the quality problem.  I've seen some video art in galleries that I'm just like, "This does nothing for me as an audience.  It tells me nothing about the creator."  The artefact itself feels low quality in terms of just production or the practice of the creation of this doesn't do much for me.
Yeah, I think a lot of the time that stuff feels like someone's made it because they're an artist, not because of any other reason.
Yeah, the engagement with the medium, the exploration of what it can be.
Yeah.
Yeah, cool.  So obviously a lot of your stuff is to do with adapting to how people are using their leisure time.  Do you see games becoming an increasing leisure tool for people in the last ten/fifteen years?
I don't think there's any doubt.  We know that it's bigger than Hollywood.  We know that audiences for gaming report a higher level of satisfaction than any other medium, and we know that, as a medium itself, it's maturing and becoming more sophisticated and more diverse in terms of what's being created.  It's not Space Invaders or Galaxian any more, or whatever it was back then.  This is a really rich—
I mean, I'm saying this and I recognise I only know small parts of it, which is the sign of something in its heyday, something in its golden era, in a way, and so it's mainstream more than anything else.
Yeah, we are at the birth of a new medium, I think, without a doubt.
Yeah.
Are you familiar with the terms serious and applied games?
Yes, yeah.
What is your general opinion of these?
Well, it depends on whether you're asking me about the notion or whether you're asking me about actual examples.
Let's start off with the notion and then go on to the actual—
So I think that any artist who's making work is making serious and applied, whatever it is they're doing.  As I was saying about my work here, actually, if you dig under the surface, what's being communicated is there are people in this world who are trying to persuade you that there is legitimacy to things, or that some things are more valid than others.  When actually, the absolute opposite is true.  There is no legitimacy to anything other than a consensus that we might have.  
And that's quite an interesting conversation that relates to very, very serious issues, but I don't have to bore the teeth off people to have that conversation with them and I don't have to make moronic, clunky stuff that explicitly says to them 'what do you think about the fact that this…?'  Because we know that as soon as you go into the conscious realm of consciously phrasing a dialogue with people, you will get consciously considered answers that will be wrong and people don't even know what they think about these things.
So what you do as an artist is you take these very serious and applied problems and you dig deeper and you go under the surface and you work on a subconscious, unconscious level with feelings and so on.  There's nothing more serious and genuine in doing it that way, and the stuff we've known about the way people will answer consciously to questions, we've known for years and years and years, fifty/sixty years.  We don't need to be going down that route.  We can be doing it in a much more sophisticated, but difficult to measure, way.  And that's where I understand the funders struggle with things.
I'll give you a good example.  A few years ago, I got asked to make a piece of work that would explore young men and women who were completely over the top smoking weed.  They said, "What we want you to do is go and interview them and find out all the bad things that have happened to them, and then we'll make a film about how, if you do this, then this will happen."  Now, we've known for fifty years that if you do that, what you're telling them will happen, will happen to them.  If we tell them that, if you drink alcohol, you'll get into risky sexual situations, then they will, because that's how a human brain works.  In that case, for example, I made that point and they said, "What else are we going to do?  We do nothing, or we do something that doesn't work."  It was like the only choices they could see, and it was all about measurability and it was all about convincing people up a hierarchy.
Well, this all to me feels really out of date, and so the notion, I would say, that there's a hell of a lot of serious and applied games and films and everything else, would never be called that.  Meanwhile, there's a lot of shite that would be called that, in all seriousness, which is a curious situation.
Can you think of any examples of things that are classified as serious or applied games that you would consider good?
No, I can't think of any that are good, and I can't think of any, particularly, that I can remember because I think when I come across them—  I mean, I think there's been things online, but I can't quote them because as soon as I come across them I sort of switch off and go away because I know what's being done to me.  People are trying to tell me something.
Can you think of works that have personally moved you in a way that you would describe as kind of more socially applicable or a commentary on society, such as your own work?  What works have moved you?
I think there is everything from a whole raft of Adam Curtis documentaries.  Notes on Blindness today, just being told about it, I didn't even have to see the whole thing to get it, to understand.  It made me cry just hearing about it.  That's serious.  That's about taking an issue that may be—  
Because there was a lot of blah about VR being an empathy machine, which was a big PR campaign around a particular outfit.  That is not necessarily true, but if you think about we're going to communicate about serious things, which is what our job is, then getting under the surface of the conscious and making you understand empathy, or whatever it might be for somebody else, or a situation – Syrian refugees is a classic example that's had so much attention paid to it in the last twelve months – I have no doubt that the majority of that stuff has been quite ineffectual and that some of it will be very effective.
So I can say, for example, on that issue, there's a lot on Syrian refugees where I just switch because it… you know.  My own daughter has a boyfriend who's a Syrian refugee.  That was far more engaging than stuff that's trying to persuade me in a propagandist way.  And yet, actually, in reality, the Chris Milk thing where you're sitting in a place and no one's doing a narration, you're just there and you see people queuing up, that was far more—  I mean, those aren't games but—
I'll tell you one that did, actually, a game, The Fallen, which is a game where you—  It's like Call of Duty where you have to shoot somebody.  So it's like a normal game, but then you hear a real story of the person you shot, which is a real story from Ukraine, and it does something.  That's where games, I think, can be far more profound because you have to take the role of the one who shoots him to hear the story.  Which means, by the very nature of it, the lens that you're hearing that story from is one of somebody who's just killed someone.
Now, we know that in the Second World War that one of the reasons men didn't want to talk about it when they came back was because they'd killed people and they'd seen their bodies and seen they were just like them.  We're not told that story.  That story is very compelling.  So The Fallen, for me, was really compelling and something that moved me and made me think, oh my god, they weren't people in uniforms, they were just blokes.
Yeah.  Thank you.  We've got quite a lot of questions here, but I think we're covering quite a lot of them before we get to them.  So one of them is, what do you think makes games different from other media?  What's compelling about games?
Because you have a role, and that role can be three days of entertainment or twenty minutes of entertainment, and that's fine.  But it can also be much more profound.  In that example of The Fallen, you are put into a role which you wouldn't necessarily fall into in real life and it forces you, in a way, to understand a number of things which are difficult; the expendability of men in our society.  The way that we can just create these scenarios where men are suddenly expendable is unbelievable.  
That's one of the things I felt when doing The Fallen.  When we see them in the distance down the scope of this gun, which I'm doing – I'm not doing that from watching a film – I'm looking down the scope at a man in the distance and he's just a black lump in a uniform.  But the moment I pull the trigger, I hear that he ran the local football team, that he was a volunteer at the Euro Football Championships, that he had a child.  These are all uncomfortable, and actually, if you were to ask me to describe to you exactly what I felt coming out of that, a lot of it is under the surface.  I'm still exploring it.  I'm still thinking about it.  That's serious.
When you're making work which people are still considering six months later, which is what a good film does, which is what a good theatre show does and what a good game does, that's very serious.
At the moment, do you think that would be classified within arts funding if that was looking at government funding?
This is the area that I'm really interested in because, at the moment, the two fringe elements of the art scene and people who, like me, are using games engine technology and gamified content, giving the audience a role and agency and interactivity, and then people who are using computer games which are more into the arts sphere or journalist sphere or documentaries sphere, they are funded in two different ways.
Now, I think that in the UK we have a very democratised arts system where anyone can apply.  You can give up your job today, or not give up your job today, as an accountant and apply for arts funding to do a project, which is very cool.  You could apply for a game.  The difficulty comes in if it's a commercially available thing.  Then it gets into trouble.
In a way, it seems to me that a lot of funding for more kind of startup funding is aimed at making you a millionaire very quickly.  But really, a lot of the time, a lot of these schemes are actually there to pay the wages and office space of an organisation that's going to support people.  I think the emphasis is on that a lot of the time and real support for companies.
So in terms of if I was going to be an indie game maker, I have no idea where I'd go to get money to just have the time to be able to do it.  As an artist, I do, I know exactly where I'd go.
Yeah, and it's tricky (laughs).
Last of the questions.
Oh really?
Yeah.
Oh, bless you.  
There's a little bit left, but—
Thanks.  Thank you.  Bless you.  Very kind.
So you're saying there's basically a void between the arts funding which is focused on creating all this non-commercial work, and then there's games funding which is only focused on commercial work, and there can be arts games which are falling in this gap between them.
Yeah, that's my feeling.  I don't feel confident to say that I know that for sure, but in scoping it out because it's an area I'm interested in, I haven't found anything in between yet.
I think that that reflects my experience of it as well, to be honest.  I've made a commercial art project, which is on Xbox and it's on Steam and it's coming to PlayStation in a few months, hopefully, and yeah, it does very definitely fall into that awkward space in the middle there.  
It's very interesting that that exists.  A patron obviously is one of the ways that people are trying to address this, that they're getting sponsored, even if it's a few pounds a month, to make stuff, and they give their stuff away for free, or they might sell it to other people who aren't their patrons.  So it's kind of trying to find this other place, but that's completely outside of governmental policy.
You see, I think there's a bigger question here, and that is that the Arts Council was set up in the UK to fund stuff which wouldn't survive otherwise, because it wasn't economically viable.  But it opens up another question, and that is, let's suppose we live in a democracy, right, and let's understand that the world is changing very rapidly and is going to be changing at even more rapid rate as time moves forward.  There are big questions about the world and, in a democracy, we're all supposed to be engaging with it.
Now, if you think about the version of democracy we have, it's a very old thing.  Realistically, we get to put a cross on a piece of paper every now and then.  But what the arts funding has done is it means that people like me, in a way, the way I see my job is to respond to the world honestly, because I don't have a boss.  If anybody told me what to say, I would tell them to fuck off, and I would do it without their money.
So it means that you have these people who are funded by the state to be democratic voices, if you like, to pose questions about the world without it being branded by Samsung or without it being branded by anybody, without it being dictated to.  As an example, I made a film years ago which got banned.  It got banned because the funding said it was off government line.  Well, that's not democratic.
So what I think is maybe not discussed is the role of people to communicate with each other, and that maybe the role of the artist is to communicate with the rest of society through things like game.  The tools they use may change every two minutes, but it absolutely makes sense, and anybody who would deny this is crazy, that gaming is one of the most powerful mediums we have and we should be using it to communicate to each other.  If it's non-commercial, if it is about discussing the world we live in and making moves forward as a democratic union of people who live within a certain border, arbitrarily, then why not allow that to be funded so that democracy is more valid and so that people feel connected to their—?  But certainly don't put the word 'democracy' on it when you actually do it.
(Laughs) 
But you see what I'm saying, right?
I do, yeah, definitely.  Have you, in your experience, collaborated with universities or academics, or have you read academic research to inspire your own work at all?
Yeah, all the time.
Okay.  Well, can you talk a little bit more about that?
So I've just finished a residency at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence at Cambridge University, working with academics who are in the field of philosophy and technology related to artificial intelligence.  That specific piece of interaction was about visualising the future and making a piece of work that was about human stories in an environment which is going to be very different.  But as a daily practice, what I'm doing is reading papers, reading books, reading websites and blogs that are around.
So, over the last twelve months, it's all been about human psychology related to this AI project because I'm interested in, as a practical example, if we're going to have AIs doing things that we're not good at, what is we're not good at?  And so looking at a whole host of academics and what they've written about human psychology who realise that there's some—  There's no way I could speak with any kind of legitimacy on that subject, unless I do that research.
Yeah.  So part of your artistic practice is to look at what research exists out there.
Yeah.  Yeah, I mean, I would say my practice is predominately research with small amounts of production, actually.
(Laughs) Yeah.  What do you think the group – so it was Cambridge, I think you said, wasn't it?
Hmm.
Yeah.  What would you say the group in Cambridge got out of their collaborating with you?  Because clearly you've been inspired a lot in your own work, but how does it work in the other direction?
They get somebody coming in who doesn't have a boss, who has communication with them which is not dependent on being paid any money by anybody, because the payment for both is coming from a third source, which is government funded.  So I can say what I want, and there were eight of us on that residency and people did say what they wanted about what people were saying.  Most of the academics stood up to that really, really well, but it was a robust discussion.
On the other hand – and this is telling – the people who came from ARM, for example, the manufacturer of processors, didn't fair well in that environment.  And they didn't fair well because what they came in their head with was a—  They came in with a PR presentation about how great it's going to be for healthcare, and what they were hoping was that the artist would make a promo video for them or something.  What they got in return was a lot of discussion around privacy issues, a lot of discussion around ethics, which became very, very uncomfortable within about five minutes, and then didn't stop for another two hours.
So when people don't have a boss, they're not going to kowtow to you.  They're going to say it as it is.  That is one of the roles of artistic voices.  If you think about the people we really admire in the world, someone like Hunter S Thompson, for example, a classic example, very well-known, what was his core message?  It was a lot about authenticity, a lot about—  If you think about his political work, it's about using inauthenticity to get to authenticity.  Very controversial, getting right to the heart of it and not being scared to say things.  That's, I think, what they got out of it, the academics.
So it's bringing almost a human soul, a human critique, a human voice, be that individual or a small collective voice, to the knowledge institutes and helping them develop a new perspective on what they are creating and what they're contributing to society.
Yeah.  In that case, that's what it was, but I'm just remembering that I'm also working with King's College in London.  They've developed a spatialisation tool for audio.  They called me in to come and have a go with it.  It was absolutely awesome and I went, "Wow, you have to turn this into a plug-in for Unity and make a VST."  And they went, "What are those things?"
So actually, we're talking about me using it in order to make something.  Now, I wouldn't do that if it were just an exercise in using their kit.  I would do that because it absolutely fits something that I'm after.  And in doing so, they get a version of their equipment being used by somebody who really wants to use it, but they also got quite commercial outcomes because they understood that there's a big market for VSTs for home musicians and for musicians in general.  There are a lot of people using Unity, and they'd never even heard of Unity, obviously.
Right.  So your kind of roaming between media and catching on to whatever technology is useful for you is also something which compliments the people who are so deep in one territory they don't see the other territories around them.
Absolutely.  Bear in mind, my practice is all DIY, therefore what I'm doing all the time is scouring for new tools that give me another inch of ground to move forward faster and better, and often that's involving unconventional combinations of software and hardware in experimental ways because I'm not releasing on Steam and trying to make ten million bucks.  I'm not releasing on PS4, trying to become a millionaire.  Therefore I will include a fan so that when you walk outside you feel the wind on your face because there's nothing to stop me.
So I think that can be quite useful as an experimental zone for, in that case, King's College to think about how can we meaningfully get this out to people?  What way does it become absolutely useful?
Yeah.  I know we've covered this next little one a few times, but it's worth kind of having it in a very direct answer, really.  Have you deliberately addressed gender, minority representation, political culture, or other serious or educational topics in your work?
Well, on different levels, all of that stuff is kind of embedded in everything because I have a view on the world which is a particular view and that throws up questions about the world, which I pose.  Not necessarily directly, clunkily posed as questions.  
However, on the other hand, I've been running a disability festival since 2003, and because of the extreme nature of their, particularly, intellectual disability, because they have a very specific and far more difficult situation than a lot of other people with disabilities, for example, at the beginning it was posed and framed as giving them a voice.  Now, that's where something changes.  
If I'm making my piece of work that may reference these things in a way that isn't maybe so obvious, that's one thing, but if I'm actually creating an environment and a forum for other people to do things, which is another one of my roles, then sometimes it can be about let's have two days to talk about disability; what's going on with that?  And maybe there is a role for that, but it immediately only attracts those people who are interested in that question.
I think when you don't pose it in that specifically targeted way, you actually reach far more people.  And a lot of that is preaching to the choir.  If you hold a festival of political films, what you'll get is people who already know everything, regaling in maybe new information but really regaling in that.  And there is a role for that.  However, if you want to reach a lot of people with a question about the way the world is – and maybe it's related to politics – if you just do it at that film festival, you're going to miss all the people who are going to be voting or miss all the people who it's relevant to.
Yeah.  I mean, to take a really pop culture thing, a lot of the X Men films have topics about race and gender embedded within them.  How impactful would you say they are compared to something which is a film about race and gender?
Hmm, it's a really good question.  You know what I think?  The way it's maybe different is that what we're seeing is – and if you actually spend the time to go and listen to what people in the alt right are saying – there is a group of people who are fed up of being told.  When people feel like they're being propagandised to, whether the arguments are good or not, they will turn their back on you and shout.  I think that that kind of propagandist voice is from another era and the discussions we have about it need to be more inclusive in the way it is discussed.
Now, what you can do in a game is give someone a role and, potentially, give them a voice to communicate with each other.  I'm sort of interested in that.  I think that's more honest and more—  I mean, look at the bottom of YouTube videos and see the comments sections.  You can see that there are people who are so fed up of not being listened to, or being told, that they will scream and shout hysterically.  It would be nice to think that we can include people enough that they are no longer debasing themselves with hysterical outbursts.  I really see the two things are connected.
If I think about my grandparents' generation and the Second World War and the First World War and the Falklands War and the Iraq War, you can see a shift, a change.  People are more informed.  They want to have a discussion.  They don't want to be told to sit back and listen to this and shut up.  So I think that's where interactive mediums and mediums where we discuss, or at least pose questions rather than giving answers—
So would you say that, in the future, some of the boundaries, or would you hope in the future some of the boundaries between what is very explicitly didactical teaching games or teaching kind of 'this is going to make you a better person because you've played this for fifteen minutes' and the more entertainment focused, do you think those boundaries will disappear between those naturally, or do you think that's something which is going to need to be pushed for?
I think that the didactical approach has got to go, or at least become a fringe-y thing for people who are trying to establish and mark a moment in time.  Say like global warming, we know that's been communicated to the population of the Earth repeatedly, and there are those who have dug deeper and gone, okay, there's a lot of client scientists agreeing with that; who's disagreeing?  Oh, he's a politician.  He's paid by the oil and gas industry, blah blah blah.  What I'm talking about is critical analysis.  Now, if you make work which doesn't allow people to exercise their critical analysis, it feels like you're telling them.
So I would say that the didactical approach needs to be replaced, but you still need a place for people to get access to – like we were saying – research.  The research in global warming is a good example.  There's a lot of people who know that it exists, global warming, and there's a lot of people who don't like to think it exists or who deny it exists.  If they actually had to discuss it, what information would they be drawing from it if it's nothing?  If it's only didactical information [one word over the other 0:35:59], then there's a big failure going on.
I'm struggling to try and put this into—  Because I guess I don't really know where the dividing line is between giving people access to real information and just shouting at them.  
I've made a show, essentially, about fake news, but you never hear that term.  The only thing you get is a letter that mentions the [0:36:30] Formula, which is a PR formula from 1937, and that gives you hint.  The idea is that you've got to go and find all of these things.  And in a way, I think what nuanced, clever, sophisticated work does is it says to your audience, "You're smart.  You can go and figure this out."
Yeah.  I think we could probably talk all day, but I think that is a—
Hmm.  Aw, bless you.  Thank you.
I think that's a lovely point to wrap up on.
Thank you.  Hm-hm.
So let's finish doing that there.
Thank you.
Thank you so much for talking to me.
Pleasure.