Lives and works in United Kingdom
I grew up in Northern Ireland in the 1970s and 1980s. Those were not good times. Sectarian conflict within a police state had made Northern Ireland a chaotic place. My parents, like the vast majority of Northern Irish people, ignored this situation and carried on with their usual activities as workers and parents. Terrorism could not break this banality of trying to get by. Television and music offered forms of escape, and so did the dawn of the home computer.
The Sinclair ZX Spectrum was a world unto itself, a world of mathematical logic, pixels and beeps. A small miracle enclosed in a black case. I remember clearly my attempts to write programs exploring the limits of the machine. I tried to provoke it and get it to send me error messages, wonderful messages as they proved the existence of a conversation between me and the computer.
It would say, “Invalid Argument” and I would reply, “I’m not here to argue”. The computer would reply, “Nonsense in BASIC”, but I knew what was going on. It took me 15 years to realise, after reading Wittgenstein, Turing and Chaitin, that what I was then trying to discover was the boundary between computability and incomputability, which, for me, is also the place between technical manuals and poetry. I have the feeling that my project will also inhabit that place.