O. Do you feel concerned that after all this work, people won’t treat it with the gravity of, say, a movie or a book? That they won’t treat it as an art form?

D.A. I hope that’s the case, yes. I get very worried about this idea of art. Having been an English literary graduate, I’ve been trying to avoid the idea of doing art ever since. I think the idea of art kills creativity. That was one of the reasons I really wanted to go and do a CD-ROM: because nobody will take it seriously, and therefore you can sneak under the fence with lots of good stuff. It’s funny how often it happens. I guess when the novel started, most early novels were just sort of pornography: Apparently, most media actually started as pornography and sort of grew from there. This is not a pornographic CD-ROM, I hasten to add. Before 1962, everybody thought pop music was sort of . . . Nobody would have ever remotely called it art, and then somebody comes along and is just so incredibly creative in it, just because they love it to bits and think it’s the greatest fun you can possibly have. And within a few years, you’ve got Sgt. Pepper’s and so on, and everybody’s calling it art. I think media are at their most interesting before anybody’s thought of calling them art, when people still think they’re just a load of junk.

O. But, say, twenty years from now, would you like to be recognized as one of the earliest practitioners of CD-ROM as art?