ROY Ascott has been talking for well over an hour about digital art and interactive technologies, artificial life and intelligent environments.
Then someone around the table happens to mention Brian Eno.
"Did you know," Ascott says, in a very matter of fact way, "he was a student of mine. So was Pete Townshend of The Who. But not in the same college, of course."
Ascott would make them play various role reversal games and disorienting exercises, such as turning Eno (an extrovert) into a total introvert, or forcing budding guitarist Townshend to go around the college for weeks without using his legs.
"He hated it," Ascott recalls, and Townshend still has nightmares of the time. He would propel himself along the corridors on a trolley cart made from orange boxes and pram wheels. The aim of these episodes in organised chaos was to break down their ideas about art, science, design, life and their very personalities. Perhaps it's even an understatement to say that Ascott's experiments in the 1960s changed the direction of British art and rock music.
Then after various art colleges such as Ipswich and Slade, Ascott spent the 1970s and 1980s in Toronto, California and Vienna. His interests, in turn, stretched from fine art and cybernetics to cyberspace and telematics.
Today, in between electronic arts festivals and spells as a visiting lecturer, he's based across the Irish Sea in Newport, at the University of Wales's Centre for Advanced Inquiry into the Interactive Arts.
Appropriately enough, most of the time his PhD students are in a virtual community", communicating with him via email and Web pages - though they do meet in the flesh about three times a year. Sometimes, Internet or no, you can't beat a good old face to face.
Ascott is on a flying visit to Dublin for a double launch at Arthouse in Temple Bar. First there's the show by the centre's latest batch of multimedia trainees - their individual Web pages, and a group CD Rom built around the metaphor of rooms in a casino.
"We often get asked by the Arts Council what demand there is for people on these courses, says Arthouse's Aileen MacKeogh. "We had 500 inquiries and 250 applications for the 15 places on the course. If that's not demand then I don't know what is.
But Ascott is also here to talk about the recent EU funded pilot project which he headed. On a relatively modest budget (15,000 ECUs) and in a short time (mainly March to July this year), it linked three groups of artists in Barcelona, Newport and Dublin.
Basically they explored artists' identities in cyberspace, from the practicalities of online collaborations to the question of what happens to galleries and museums as they go digital.
Each group in the "Identities in Cyberspace" project was a mixture of artists/designers (the Irish ones included Grace Weir and Barbara Ellison), arts administrators and arts educators. The 18 people were linked by a combination of face to face meetings and online encounters, using email and low budget video conferencing (CU SeeMe), and a jointly developed Web site.
"For 15 years now I've been involved in collaborative projects and before this one they've never really worked that well before," Ascott recalls. "It was a case of an artist here who puts his stuff on the table, and an artist there who puts his stuff on the table, and then an artist there, and so on - but it never even added up to the sum of its parts. We said this isn't working, and instead of trying to output all this stuff, we tried to turn the question inside out and rephrase it in terms of `How do we invite people into our minds?' Then each person described their minds through Web pages, with hyperlinks to images, sound and text."
Hence the Web pages (at http://www.arthouse.ie/exhibitions/idincyh/html/homepage.html). A warning though: for mere mortals with normal modems and PCs, much of the site is heavy on bandwidth hogging graphics, and it requires a Web browser that can handle those pesky Frames. Then again, don't blame artists for wanting to be, well, state of the art.
"The most important point of being on the Net is the reconfiguration of the self" he says. "It's the difference between paranoia and what I like to call telenoia, Paranoia is all about the self and privacy, singularity and intensive individualism. Telenoia is the opposite - it's about open endedness, about the multiple selves of telepresence ....." he tiptoes towards the pun,". . .telepresents. With telepresents, the future hits us faster, and we are able to have in multiple selves and multiple consciousness."
They hope the project will lead - to a pan European "collegium" of digital arts centres, mixing cyberspace encounters with face to face ones. But that's a long term goal, and Ascott stresses the process rather than some end product. Similarly, he says, the focus shouldn't just be on the artist or the artwork or the audience. The emphasis should be on the links between all three, on how they connect, on dynamic relationships.
To illustrate, he talks about how art shares so much with the waveform: "Here is something you can never touch - it's here but not here, it's a dynamic thing, it's here and then it's gone.
"This bilding [Arthouse] is part of a very small but very important international movement to create points of connectivity in urban and rural centres, and where what happens inside the building is only half the story. That's what makes it something special - that it's not just a production centre, it's not just about training facilities, it's not just a cybercafe and modern version of a gallery - it's a totally new concept."
Intriguing and intangible, like a waveform, the art of the edge of chaos.