I exhibited in a group show in a disused theatre. My work was made for the theatre’s offices…

For all the time we pour in to computers it’s strange that the only physical objects we generally extract from them is the ‘printout’. Information comes out in a myriad of forms, from the screen, the speakers, the optical drive, but this information is either transient – sound, light – or is accessible only through the medium of another computer. The printout potentially is the most permanent record of all our work on computers – while technology marches on and legacy storage systems and document formats become ever harder to access, paper and ink extend their track record of millenia.

The common home inkjet printer provides further evidence of its difference to other peripherals by the way it moves. Single minded, it can shake the cheap Ikea computer table it sits on to its very core. Its mechanical whirring, the clicks and beeps it makes can be mysterious and unknowable. It may decide to do our bidding or it may decide to print out half a page we’d asked it to print days ago and forgotten about.

They must be fed, and demand an expensive vintage to drink.
They move.
They respond to stimuli.

The idea became a kind of technological cave painting. Some people drew patterns, some people wrote philosophical words, some drew clever things, a couple of people managed to get photos on to my computer. Most people drew people.