Jake Tilson > info

Daniel Jackson interviews Jake Tilson in 1995 for Mute magazine	Jake Tilson has, over the last six months, created an internet site for The Laboratory at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art in Oxford University. Apart from containing areas about the school, its location, curriculum and staff, the site holds TheCooker a large and steadily spreading personal site created as an experimental area. Jake Tilson also publishes an arts magazine Atlas that, he would stress, is not a dead tree version of TheCooker nor vice versa is TheCooker the on-line version of Atlas
DANIEL JACKSON: With physical publications you have an artefact; I find it interesting that you have created this incredibly complex and well thought-out site that, accompanied by the little book, becomes so much more a thing, something approachable. You look at the book, then you look at the pages and this gives them a lot more significance.	JAKE TILSON: The power of print is still very potent, particularly for the art world. To publish the website booklet is important and useful. It enables discussion and some understanding of what I really want people to be looking at which is the site itself. So many people haven't seen the internet yet and have strange expectations of what it might be, they often expect television. The only similarity to television is that most people view the web at home on a screen. For the first time in computing there is a truly popular medium with an inbuilt distribution system that is unregulated. There are also echoes of publishing. I began taking publishing as a serious art activity in the mid 1970's when I was at Chelsea School of Art during punk years. I see a similar anarchic edge to the web. Potentially this makes the internet a high street technology. I use telecommunication and high street technologies in other areas of my art, such as Xeroxing, faxing, postal services and commercial printers. Like other forms of popluar culture used to artistic ends such artefacts are notoriously difficult to exhibit when taken out of their specific context. Early video art suffered similarily until artists developed strategies for incorporating their art into museum and gallery settings. Computer generated art in the past seemed cumbersome and lacked the domestic parallels of current technology. It had to be displayed in galleries loaded with expensive equipment. You would have needed to have studied mathematics and programming to become a computer artist then, whereas to work on the net you don't. It's surprisingly easy to write HTML; it looks difficult but it isn't.
Although I think as the standards evolves there will be more complexities to it.	Yes, there already are with the new version of Netscape and Java coming soon. When I began to look at the internet most sites looked similar. Comparing the White House site to an undergraduate's site in upstate New York it is surprising how visually equal they appear. It appears to be democratic that the White House are spending as much as they possibly can on their site and yet the student's site looks better. This has also made me aware of the diversity of people using the internet. I think artists should and must get involved but I wasn't prepared for how different a space the world wide web would be to work with. Friends who know I am involved in the web expect to see an on-line version of Atlas. So far I haven't seen an on-line magazine that works well. If you treat the terminology of a site carefully people will approach the work differently. To call a part of a site an on-line magazine refers to something else rather than to its self. I am careful when naming things. I still haven't found a suitable word for a page on a monitor. It isn't a page; pages are items bound into books whose sequential manner can't be easily interfered with.
The internet has expanded the possibilities of what you can do in publishing - do you feel that the book is becoming a bit tired?	No, I feel quite the reverse. I think it helps publishing; new technology constantly reaffirms a book's uniqueness.
With this democracy of publishing, there is a certain irony that Netscape has a complete monopoly on browsers.	It's hard to find parallels outside computing. Publishing is different, you can still distribute books without W.H. Smith's yet without Netscape you're buggered.
Again on the theme of the artefact, is the ephemeral nature of this medium, which is in a state of constant change, important to you? I remember when I first started looking at pages, they were formatted text with images, an improvement on the DOS prompt and green text. Initially I found it very attractive even though it was only black and blue on grey, but now with the new Netscape extensions those grey pages look so much more grey.	Yes, you're right, they do. A site that hasn't been touched in six months shows itself very quickly. When Netscape 1.1 first came out it was interesting to see who implemented those changes quickly. It can be exciting going to "source" and seeing how people have twiddled and changed their pages in subtle ways, but I feel the danger of having my art become led by technology which doesn't interest me at all. Ideas are paramount and I use the appropriate vehicle for those ideas not because I just happen to like a piece of equipment or software.
In the Arts there is a traditional feeling you need to get grips with your craft, is that something you adhere to?	I do like having control over a medium, but allowing Netscape to display the work differently is part of its charm, I like the ephemeral nature of it. It's a key element that distinguishes it from paper based publishing.
Your publications are artefacts, objects, people can store them and keep them on their bookshelves but with Netscape's its ...	In peoples minds. Would I want to download the 1995 version of my site onto a CD-ROM and sell it ? I don't think so.
That has some important repercussions in terms of art, the object, galleries, collecting exhibiting ... Do you think the consumers of art will be happy with this, will they be able to deal with this as a way of collecting art?	No. Something I have found producing Atlas magazine and artist's books is that publications are a non-conspicuous form of collecting; it doesn't fulfil the reasons why a lot people collect. It's not a painting on a wall or an installation. Artists on the internet will have to try and develop other ways of attracting support. My situation is different as I produce work in many areas. Publishing has never made me money, it's just something I feel the need to do, I feel the same about "TheCooker".
When you actually set out to create the site, did you want to break down that linear structure of going from one thing to another - was that an intention from the beginning or was that something that evolved from working with the medium?	A bit of both, I thought about the site carefully before touching a keyboard. I came up with the idea of "areas" which I think is an appropriate way of describing something as amorphous as a section of web site. There are three main "areas" to the site which I hope reflect my activities as an artist. Area 1 is "Here"and contains artworks made only for Netscape that cannot exist outside of the world wide web environment such as "Jump" and "Dip". Area 2 is "There" and reflects current projects not on the web such as exhibitions, lecture notes and publications. Area 3 is "Files" which is an area for storing contextual information that housed elsewhere would consume trees. This description does not describe "TheCooker" well. It's eight hundred components have to be seen and used. Eventually there comes a point when you have to work with the site on-line. This sparks off new ideas that relate to the sites actual context on the internet itself. I receive advice and technical support from "True-D Software" in Oxford who had approached "The Laboratory" at the Ruskin where my project is based. I'm glad Ben Russell at Milo Hedge, whose own site "Oneday" is well worth seeing, urged me to go on-line as did Alan Milosevic who runs True-D. A site is not a finished artefact, it constantly changes, so "TheCooker" went on-line when I felt it had begun. Unlike a book a website doesn't occupy physical space. You pick up a book and know how many page there are. The typeface size indicates how long it will take to read, you know when you've reach the middle. You have a complete overview of the artefact. To include an index, or a map on a site is an attempt to address that problem. To try and give people some sense of volume or scale.
Do you think that's something people will learn and pick up as they learn how to use the internet? There is a misconception that the internet is a very ethereal thing.	I hope so. Few of my friends are on-line, particularly in the art world. Producing something like "TheCooker" excludes 99% of my previous audience, although it increases it elsewhere. I get feedback from the mail-form on the site so I do begin to get an idea of who is visiting "TheCooker".
Do you think the internet is challenging the status quo in the art world or do you think it has the potential to?	At the moment it is difficult to say. I think it has certainly has people worried about a lag in their involvement with information technology. People have been very lazy and are now beginning to jump on board in hoards, often unsuccessfully - so many sites are just feet in the door created by someone during their lunch hour.
This is an important issue for art education - how the internet and computing in general should be integrated into fine art education.	The Ruskin is beginning to and I hope Ruskin students will produce work exclusively for the site soon. At the Royal College of Art where I teach in Communication Design, which covers graphics, multimedia and illustration I encourage students to look at the world wide web and to think about producing work for it. The internets an area crying out for good designers and artists.
Do you feel art students should be taught the technical sides of these things; how to write pearl scripts for example?	Absolutely. Even just to be exposed to the technical side as I have been at True-D reveals the possibilities of what you can do and what you're not doing. It throws up new ways of working. Art schools in general ignore the technical side and have little or no contact with software writers. They tend to buy software off the shelf. For artists it is important to be aware of all the opportunities. Some of the sites I visit the most are the Lab-Cams sites run by scientists - a video capture view of their coffee pot taken every 20 minutes, wonderful.
There's a great one that involves controlling a robot in the Nevada desert on a nuclear test site.	Yes, I also like Naomi the cat in Pittsburg, who through a bit of "Tandy" or "Radio Shack" technology lets you talk to her. Some of these works are considerably more interesting than so-called art sites.
Yes, I have a problem with this concept of the virtual gallery.	I have a problem with virtual anything. Virtual is a mean word for what is a real experience of something. Virtual galleries completely miss the point. A printed art catalogue is as detached from actual artworks as a virtual gallery. People are so used to viewing printed matter as being a real experience of art that they don't question it. Virtual galleries are exceedingly boring. I like the use of the word virtual here because I see it as a negative word that implies an insult or secondary experience. But for serious and thought provoking work in this area I would avoid the term altogether. The area "Files" on "TheCooker" contains amongst other things, artworks and published works databases. I try not to pretend the images are anything other than research data for people to look at. It is organised in a way that doesn't con you into thinking that it is actually art, which it is not. It's a transparency converted into indexed colour and displayed on your screen. Perhaps the proliferation of Virtual Galleries on CDROM will get people infront of real art in the way home video seems to have boosted filmgoing. Unfortunately I think CDROM galleries will become a booming area.
It remains to be seen what Bill Gates does with Windows95 and the on-line services, I know he has bought the digital rights to many works of art.	He is also employing historians to write for Microsoft so he'll own the words to the artworks, which is very important: to own both is very clever. It reminds me of certain major art museums writing the Western history of art around their own collections. Such dominance is hard to fight. Microsoft are doing the same and will exclude many avenues of art - writing a particular history of art that many people have access to and consider to be the only truth.