Hi Arran, why don't you tell us a bit about yourself.
I'm a London-based artist, originally from Coventry. My practice is centred around memory, nostalgia, irony, the internet, technology, appropriated imagery and gifs for the most, this is ever expanding and evolving though of course, these are perhaps just root interests from which ideas stem from.
What is the shittest thing about Coventry?
It has its nice aspects, my family still live there but it is very limited in terms of what can be achieved creatively and this is what led me to move to London.
My favourite Coventry footballer was Steve Ogrizovic, because his face looked like a liver and bacon dinner.
David Icke is a bit nutty, but I'd have to say Mickey Quinn becuase he had a moustache and a beer belly. My most favourite player, though, was Roberto Mancini. I used to watch Football Italia on Channel 4 every Sunday, as there wasn't any English football on the tv, then go out to copy his vollying technique in the garden.
Okay, how did you get into Internet Art? What are the themes of your work?
I have been interested in the interaction between art, computers and the internet since first being introduced to the world wide web in the mid 90's. I made many websites that were constructed in MSpaint, Word and FrontPage (and later flash) and then hosted on a variety of services like Moonfruit, Tripod, Geocities et al. I wish I remembered the addresses for these but they are probably long deleted through inactivity.
We've seen glimpses of your massive GIF archive, how do you think your intangible hoard compares to the cold, hard documents kept in, say, the Guatamala Police archives?
It can be difficult consulting a digital archive at times because sometimes when searching for specific gifs I find I have accidently saved them to the wrong folder then can't find them again. And sometimes I don't change the filename at all so i have to incessantly trawl through thumbnails.
There is also the issue of data loss with hard drive failure which in real life would be the equivelant of a fire raging through the archives and reducing the files to ashes.
Could you explain what a meme is? (havent you got your own meme)
It is an internet term for a fast transferring and developing idea that spreads from forums into other aspects of the internet. The best memes tend to be ones that are adaptable to personal tastes such as recent examples like Foul Bachelor Frog which allows the user to add their own text which is relevant to them.
I had a shortlived meme of myself and P Diddy that came about from an image I posted on Facebook and Tumblr and was taken up briefly in the fast-paced meme factory that is dump.fm. As with most memes, it is long since forgotten now.
Like Kilroy?
I think Kilroy is a real life meme in as much as the history of him stems from the omega symbol and was scratched into surfaces by australian soldiers. There are some examples of its use on the internet; I have a gif of Kilroy on my computer which was used as a banner on a website.
How can the untrained eye distinguished between your acute irony and things that are actually shit?
I guess it would be difficult, it's the same sort of thing if you look at the Youtube comments in response to M.I.A's XXXO video, "it's terrible, it look's like a myspace page". I'd like to think that it's apparent that there is some craft and skill in my work that suggests it is acutely ironic rather than just shit.
What projects have you currently got vibing?
Obvs this one for Semiotics, some other video work, an animation for Nous Vous Publications and an installation piece in the pipeline.
Here's a still from the piece he's working on for Clinic, and to see more of his 'acutely ironic and not just shit' compositions, visit his damn blog http://plop-sensation.