I did various jobs before getting into design, from a news pho­tog­ra­pher, record contract during the UK rave scene and work­ing in a factory. I was always coding in my spare time, ever since the early eighties but when I first expe­ri­enced Photo­shop on my Dad's Macbook I started to learn about graphic design and learn about digital design.

In 1996 I called up a fledgling web agency to see if they had any jobs. Thank­fully they took a chance on me and took me - that was my escape from the fac­tory drilling holes in fibre­glass. I would say the main thing that has helped me forge a career in this world is the gen­eros­ity of others.

Well everything in the world is made from numbers and combi­na­tions of numbers. There's a purity to them which, through dif­fer­ent combi­na­tions, gives rise to com­plex sys­tems. I like how I can trans­pose those numbers to create other things, so the data acts as a starting point, or seeds which will create creative branches to follow. As some­one who loves the cre­ative power of code, numbers are easy to push and pull to help explore various creative expressions.

At the beginning I'll have lots of input, be that data, in­flu­ences, non-sensical sketches, thoughts on a sense of di­rec­tion for the work. Over a period of time I ex­plore various routes, dis­count­ing those that don't work or picking out some bits that do and going off on tangents to explore further. All the time I'm try­ing to get to the core essence of the work, trying to distill things down to a single point.

However I'm not interested in pro­vid­ing an­swers but want to leave people with more ques­tions. I think art should provide a mech­a­nism to ask ques­tions about the world around us.

I tend to look in the opposite di­rec­tion of what people might perceive my inter­ests to be. I don't look at other similar work or data vi­su­al­i­sa­tion or any­thing like that. Instead I look else­where. I just got a great book on the glass artist Sam Herman. His work is com­plete­ly stun­ning. Even though I'm not work­ing in glass, the forms and textures are still in­spir­ing to me, espe­cially in rela­tion to the more sculp­tural work I do now. I think I like when things are the op­po­site of what you expect them to be.

We have at our disposal a fantastic medium called The Internet in which we can publish our work. By putting your work out there, work you believe de­serves to exist, you start a con­ver­sa­tion with those who across it. It may disgust people, it may have people heap­ing praise on you. Both are valid and you just never know where these con­ver­sa­tions may lead.

Cinema Redux would never had ended up in the per­ma­nent col­lec­tion of MoMA if it was still sat here on my hard-drive instead of on my web­site. So put your work out there, on every channel you can, in­clud­ing your own personal web­site. It doesn't have to be perfect, just some­thing to make your mark on the world.