Alex Mayhew: There's one point where I thought I was going to kill him.

My best work comes from organic growth--from actually working on the thing. When you write up a concept, you don't really know what's going to happen when you actually start doing the concepts. Usually the best stuff comes from inner organic growth, which requires a degree of looseness. So while you need to start with a firm plan and an idea of what you're going to do, what it's going to look like, how it's going to work and why it's going to work, you have to plan organic growth and development.

Productions usually go one of two ways. They usually never ever finish getting made because they turn into monsters that just grow out of control. People have all these amazing ideas and they're all over the place. Or everything's sort of designed and very tightly done before it's actually made and you end up with this piece that has no room to move or grow. It becomes very stifled but at least it gets finished. But there can be a balance, and I think we just about managed to achieve it.

There are a couple of other critical lessons from this project. It's important not to separate the main design tasks into separate rooms- one for graphics, one for interactivity and another for the overall programming. That's a big mistake. Interactive design you to use both parts of your brain. You must develop all aspects in harmony with each other rather than trying to apply one after the other or bolt one thing onto another thing.

I think that's a common mistake. It didn't happen with us. I had some technical knowledge fortunately that I could integrate into my visual design background. The more you know about the technical stuff the more you know what's possible. You have more control of your concepts because you know both the potential and the limitations of the technology and work within those constraints.

Another issue is that because people are coming into multimedia from graphic design, film, music production, etc, they seem to bring their own preconceptions and baggage with them. I feel that's a mistake. All those mediums can be used as inspiration in interactive media. Even in regards to our pre-conceptions about story telling. It shouldn't be an interactive story. It should be an interactive something--I can't think of a name for it. You have to approach this medium with an open mind and to give the room for the medium to develop as a medium in its own right. It is very rare that the community of artists working in multimedia allow this to happen. Which is partly why the medium hasn't had a chance to grow and why the full potential, I feel, hasn't been realized.

Interviewer: There's an interesting book by Steven Johnson, who was the artistic director of something called Feed.com, an artistic web site out of New York. It's called "Interface Culture." His essential argument is that interface has its own set of aesthetic qualitied. He talks a lot about this left brain right brain kind of synthesis&emdash;that it's not useful for people to stake out the ground of either or. Either you're a good story teller or you're a good programmer or interface designer.

Coming from theater, I tend toward upholding this dicotomy. If you're an interface designer, you're just pushing data around. If you're a story teller, you're making meaning, connecting to emotions and being transformative, Perhaps, as my colleague Mark Petrakis suggested, I have to move from my dramaturgical prejudices and understand the new paradigm of the "mediaturg," someone that understands the core aesthetic principals of a number of media, as well as the role of interface, in order to successfully approach an interactive artistic project.

Alex Mayhew: It's very difficult. To do good multimedia, you have to have a grasp of a lot of different mediums. Maybe I'm not particularly good at anything but I'm sort of good at combining them all.

Interviewer: Any artist needs a transparent relationship with their tools. That is the essence of craft.

Alex Mayhew: Yes. One day I want to do an interactive piece that doesn't use computers. Because really, it's the ideas that count not the budget necessarily or the creative team. .