Back in May 1994 when the internet was just about to become commercially recognised I discovered it existed and realised it's potential. At the time I was making a university project for Creative Review magazine which involved redesigning the magazine as a CDRom. That wasn't the brief. The module was called Design Futures. We were asked to think about the future. For my answer to the brief I represented the content of a paper magazine as 'nodes' on screen. The nodes formed a skeleton map of the whole magazine. I repurposed the issue with Brody and Carson on the front cover. I made it in Director 3.0 and I took the working demo on a 40mb Syquest disk to the Creative Review offices in Poland Street in Soho. I met the design editor Gary Cook and after showing the work he told me to meet *Ivan Pope, "a guy that is currently the biggest thing on the internet in Britain."

A few days later I visited Ivan in his basement flat in Hackney and we talked. I was blown away by this new world I didn't even know existed. Afterwards, he gave me his email address but I didn't have my own yet, in fact I didn't even know what email was until twenty minutes before he wrote it down on a post-it note. As soon as I got back to University I made sure someone got me an email address and told me how to send emails. I only sent emails to Ivan because I didn't know anyone else with an email address.

In my next and final year at University, I made a Contextual Study presentation on the internet, I wrote my dissertation on the internet, I entered the RSA competition with a piece about Video-on-Demand but the one single project that scared the living daylights out of me was a Way-Finding brief about the University Campus. We completed to module in teams and nothing particularly amazing came out of it until I was asked to go to a 'control meeting' for the developers who were rebuilding the Harrow Media Lab campus for the University of Westminster around February 1995. I sat amongst lecturers, security guards and dinner ladies amongst others while we brainstormed/argued about how students move around the environment of a closed campus and what their 'needs' are. I left that meeting with a piece of paper full of notes, drawings and diagrams which I got date stamped at the university offices. I also asked my fellow Graphic Information Design student friends to sign and date the paper to protect the intellectual property of that inspiration. Since that day I've never stopped thinking about Telepress.

Inspiration is reliant on some powerful force that can't quite be named but can't quite be ignored. It is like a visitation from something profound and incomprehensible. To be even momentarily unintelligable, unrecognisable to yourself, then inspiration is akin to possession, to being taken over. And this, for some reason that is worth considering does not come naturally to most people. Inspiration can be extremely disturbing; it can leave us at odds with ourselves, bemused by the kinds of things we find ourselves making. Just as you can't try and have a dream, or decide before hand what it will be, inspired work, whatever it's prehistory of crisis or trauma, can seem to just happen. When we are inspired we can feel both unintelligable to ourselves and most truly ourselves. At our best.

We need to be able to wait, without certainty, for the thing we want. This, in a sense, is the faith of the believer in artistic inspiration. Some think inspiration was the invention of irresponsible, decadent people who refused to take the consequences of their actions: people who were always saying, one way or another, 'it wasn't really me.'
When it happens you get a feeling that all the stars are aligned and suddenly reality shifts and embraces something that feels eternal.

It's difficult to cultivate except by simply creating the time, you have to be patient. You're letting associations form between apparently disparate ideas. It's 99 per cent perspiration and 1 per cent inspiration. It could be the memory of a stupidly joyful children's game or the rush of remembrance of grief or love.

*In 1994 Ivan Pope started "WebMedia" the UK's first ever New Media Agency, based under "Cyberia" the UK's first ever Cyber Cafe on London's Whitfield Street.