E A R L Y  R E S E A R C H

This project originated with a commission from the BBC TV series "The NET". Our programme was broadcast on Monday the 6th of April on BBC2, in the UK, you can still read our original proposal to the producers here. At the time we wrote this I don't think we realised that we'd still be developing the work over a year later! However it has taken many different forms during this time and so we've decided to file these away in this 'archive' area.

We began to think about text based environments by visiting two existing Mu**s, where we spent a long time just getting to know how to move about, talk to other players etc. We entered these spaces pretty much as 'normal users' but tried to imply an element of 'active voyeurism' in our behavior through the way we described our characters. ( In a Mu** other players can 'look' at you and read a description of your character). We carried objects that implied we might be trying to map out the spaces.

At the same time we put out a series of questions for regular Mu** users onto news groups and started to collect responses. Through this we met with Alan Schwartz, who runs M*U*S*H, and we began to develop ideas collaboratively as to the possibilities for 'live' activities within M*U*S*H and thoughts towards what a Mu** developed by ourselves might contain.

Most of these ideas came out of trying to create drawings based on the Mu**s we had visited, and the experience of using 'interactive 'objects' within M*U*S*H. This brought on an interesting 'crisis of audience confidence'.
We are currently working towards ultimately setting up our own Mu**. In order to do this initially we started to draw out a map for ourselves of objects/spaces we would like it to contain. As we are visual artists we wanted to base these on images from our practice, and we began to think about how the viewer (or writer) may describe these in a very different way to us.

So in collaboration with Alan we put the images we were planning to use into M*U*S*H (you can view M*U*S*H using a special client called 'pueblo' which enables you to see images within the text - if you don't have this the text points you out to the web pages). You can also see the map and images here - since we developed this 'exhibit' in the M*U*S*H art gallery we have moved on to new ideas for our Mu*, but the exhibit is still in the gallery and we thought we would leave it running as a record of the projects first stage - we are also continuing to collaborate with Alan.



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