When I was a kid, I watched so many Japanese educational programs and anime series that my parents were worried that I didn't go out to play enough. In high school, I would fill up notebooks and notebooks of characters that I created that resembled manga. By the time I was 18 I seriously thought I would be a comic book illustrator. I started graphic design school, I had my own series. It was fun. I drew them in paper and in time I learned to scan them and use a computer to color them in. I think I used Corel Photo or something like that. Then 1998 came and I met the Internet for the first time. I started to make a website for my comics and that was my first website. I made it in Notepad. My comics never succeeded but my website was very good for the times. I've been in love with the Internet ever since.

My medium is still the Internet. To be quite honest I think it is the single most powerful invention of mankind in a long time. Hyperlinking is to me like the new wheel or the invention of fire. It's immediate, open, democratic, universal. Everything that the real world with its limits and politics fails to be. The vast interconnected knowledge of the human race. The tools change with time. I started working on Notepad. Then I knew html editors like Dreamweaver and FrontPage. Then I went back to text-based editors. I taught myself Flash. Then I taught myself PHP and MySQL. I learned Processing. Who knows what I’ll have to learn next? But I’m already excited about it. The tools depend on the job. Most of these tools I chose because of the way they are offered. They can be learned and used by anybody. Some of them are even offered for free. The documentation is extensive and accessible. There are communities of people who learn together everyday. All you gotta do is have the desire to learn. Education was never this easy before.

I think as far as tools go I’m pretty well set. I’ve got my computer, my brains, a bunch of software packages and an internet connection. Ok, so maybe I would also like to have a room full of my own servers where I could run many crazy experiments. I also would like everyone in the world to have broadband. Then I would have more people to learn from. And more people to play with the toys I make. In my dream situation every corner of the world would be connected and there wouldn't be any control, filtering, censorship or regulations for the web. Maybe we can create a new world online, a form of existence without a physical shape, free from all the limits, limits and constraints of the real world.

I like to make systems that a lot of people can play with and hopefully these people will learn something from themselves and teach me in the process.

I think the hardest thing is to accurately lead a person through a system in a way they can find easy enough to learn fast but complex enough to allow good levels of control. It's a fine balance to know which decisions to make for a user and which leave to them.

I didn't know much about media art until I came to FABRICA. Then I met Andy Cameron and all the guys here working in the department. I started to realize that making people interact with systems and making them a part of an application with their input and experience was an art on its own. And in that sense I began to think of my stuff as "art". I'm not an expert on art theory but it's clear that the there are many differences between new media arts and traditional arts. In traditional arts, the artist creates a piece and it's finished. It's put in a physical space and we all sit there and look at it and think about the message of the author. We are there only to be consumers of the piece. In new Media arts you create a system, an interaction, an experience. The piece is never finished because every new person who comes in contact with it gives it a new form. People have a say in it. The art becomes how people rearrange the piece. They are not just consumers any more. They are creators as well. If your piece is successful people will use it and will continue to want to use it. If it fails it will just sit there.

My stuff more often than not comes from a problem that a group of people might have. I then think about how to make these people interact to share with each other. I don't intend to solve anything for them, but to find a clever way so that they can themselves come together and move towards solutions. Other times I just want to speak my mind about something but I still think of the way that other people can see my point of view and interact with it, experience it and in the end they might tell me how wrong I am. This is of benefit too.

I don't think I have one but I really like something I read once on Wired: "We are the web".

When I see old problems that could be solved simply by everyone agreeing to share somehow.

First, I want to learn more about making successful systems. Then I want to learn how to break old systems using technology. I want to make people come first and use technology to achieve it. And I want to continue benefiting from the accumulated knowledge of everyone else.

I would have to say that everything I know about the Internet since I made my first website has been a big influence, the bits of information that I have consumed and that were shared by others, and it never stops, there's always something new coming, there's is always something new to learn, it's almost too much. Also the Interactive Department of FABRICA has been a great help in letting it all settle into my head and helping me sort out what it could mean.