Well, Chris Fell, director of the Leeds Film Festival, set up the strand to basically explore crossovers between different media – computer gaming crossing over with film, etc. – so that’s what he initially set it up for, and he gave it the name ‘Evolution’.

That was probably about 1999. It’s too much of a long story, but I wasn’t involved in it at that stage. It was a very different thing then. And then in 2001 Lumen was formed, and the film festival basically handed it over to us to develop and we decided to change the sort of work that it was looking at to have a more media arts focus. Lumen had really just formed in 2001 so we had no experience at all of putting a programme together. It was really just a strand of the festival and started just as a one-day conference with some other bits around it. The second year is really when we started to change it and tried to make it a much larger strand of the festival.

Yeah, he was. He took over as festival director in 1997 or 1998 and radically changed the way it was organised. He did away with all the existing strands and designed a new programme. I think he felt that there needed to be a section of the programme that dealt with crossovers in some way. But having said that, there wasn’t really a part of his programme that dealt with experimental practice, so Evolution seemed to be the place where that kind of work could sit. Chris started it with much more of a commercial mind, with the idea of getting gaming companies and things involved. It was really to do with that idea of the industry, and how the film industry crosses over with the gaming industry.

He was very happy for us to really concentrate on it and take it in the direction that we wanted to and he didn’t get involved at all, he just let us get on with it, and had a lot of trust in us. People like Alex [King] who joined the team more recently have a good dialogue with other types of cinema, he goes to Rotterdam Film Festival and watches a lot of work that we’re mutually interested in there, so there’s a really healthy dialogue now.

Dennis [Hopkins], who founded the organisation, set it up to support arts projects by providing audiovisual equipment. I’ve always been the person who’s dealt with the development of the artistic programme whereas Dennis was always concerned with the equipment resource. Evolution was handed to us pretty much right at the beginning so it’s been something that’s moved along with Lumen really.

I suppose the best way of describing it is that we just tried loads of things out. And as I’ve developed my ideas then the programme’s developed with it. In 2001 the conference was in the Odeon Cinema in Leeds which could seat a thousand people and about seven hundred people came to it. It made us realise that there was a need for that in Leeds more than anything, which is why we began to expand the programme.

We did a lot of legwork trying to get students to attend from art colleges and universities. A large proportion of the audience was a student audience. And we didn’t expect that many people to come at all. We thought we were using a venue that was far too big. What made them come? I don’t know, I think it was built into timetables for students so it was easy to attend. So it was probably more for practical reasons rather than people having heard of the speakers.

Yeah, there was a limited activity in media arts. Leeds is very much focused on performing art. There’s the Leeds Film Festival, and there’s the art gallery, the Henry Moore Institute, but in terms of media-arts practice there wasn’t anybody really looking at it.

I suppose initially it was other people’s input. In 2002 there were a lot of collaborative screenings that we did with people. That was when I first worked with Greg Kurcewicz to organise a programmme of Lillian Schwartz's early computer films which we later toured. I worked with Sixpack Film who put some films together for us. So it was using other people’s knowledge and expertise but also bits of our own interests – like Billy Klüver being there came out of some research that I was doing into the history of art and technology.

We’ve always worked with the universities and increasingly so. The University of Leeds has always given us some money, CentreCATH, which is finishing in July 2006 is an AHRB project – it stands for Centre for Cultural Analysis Theory and History, something like that. They’ve always been interested in the programme. In 2003 there was Zygmunt Bauman in conversation with Gustav Metzger, which was presented by CentreCATH. The twinning of those people came from my ideas but they were happy to facilitate something that I wanted to do.

Yeah, there has been but it’s increasingly less so. I think it was probably in 2002 or 2003 that a curator I have a lot of respect for said there should be less talking and more films. I tend to agree with that, that it should really be about the work. In 2001 we had a conference but didn’t show much, which didn’t make the thing that they’re talking about intangible for the audience. So we have increasingly tried to make it so that the work is the main thing, to enable people to experience something first-hand, rather than it just being talked about. It seems completely ridiculous to me now to talk about something without actually showing it to people.

For 2006 I was thinking more about the eventfulness of the festival, that it should be really eventful. So I’ve put some expanded work on which really doesn’t need any introduction – it doesn’t need any discussion about it, it’s just what it is, likewise with the screenings as well.