In 1995 I worked with director Richard Curson Smith to develop a TV documentary for BBC2s TX series called Pandaemonium.
This programme came out of a series of conversations Richard and I had on the subject of machine intelligence and post-human development, something which I had been interested in since working on the CyberMedia series BUZZ for Channel 4 in the early 1990s.
As a byproduct of working on BUZZ, I came into direct contact with artists like the Survival Research Laboratories, writers like Bruce Stirling and William Gibson, theorists like Brenda Laurel and futurists like Ralph Merkel and K. Eric Drexler. The result was a burgeoning interest in what it meant to be human in a world where the traditional lines between the body, intelligence and technology were becoming blurred and promised to become more so.
The outcome of our conversations was Pandaemonium, a programme which used the work of artists Chico McMurtry, Stelarc, David Therrien and Survival Research Laboratories to explore post-human development and where it might take us.
This programme in turn brought me into contact with an extraordinary artist and editor called Dr Rachel Armstrong, who worked extensively with the artist Orlan at the time. Rachel and I discussed at length the cultural applications of nanotechnology and how it might effect human beings. We also spend a lot of time discussing the cultural fear of machine intelligence especially as shown in films like Terminator and how Survival Research Laboratories used this in their work.
When Rachel was asked to edit a publication called Sci-fi Aesthetics for Art and Design magazine, she commissioned me to write two essays for the book. These were on the subjects of machine intelligence and nanotechnology...and hence my only published work!