The Michael Hewitt Interview: Graham Brown-Martin - Thinking aloud

If Graham Brown-Martin's career plan had gone as intended, he might above all, a thinker with his own views on the net and future technologies. Michael Hewitt manages to snare a couple of hours of a busy man's time. now be orbiting us in the Mir space station. Either that, or standing in the middle of a field with his arm up a cow's backside. That he isn't is due partly to a man down the pub and partly to a maggot. Instead, Graham Brown-Martin - to whom I shall refer hereafter simply as GBM, because (a) his full name is a bit too cumbersome and screws up my spellchecker; and (b) it sounds like a species of nesting bird - has become a millionaire mover and shaker in the multimedia and "ultramedia" business, with fingers in various film, TV, music and art pies.

When the Daily Telegraph interviewed him recently, it set great store by the fact that he was born in Bletchley Park (in 1964): it was as if coming from the birthplace of modern computing had somehow given him a leg-up in the business, in much the same way that coming from Bethlehem does if you're in the religion industry. GBM, however, is dismissive of this. "Originally, I had no interest in computers. I wanted to be an astronaut, a vet or a pop star. I had problems with the educational system and, although I was a bookish child, I was diagnosed as hyperactive, which made it difficult to teach me. I got into trouble quite a lot, and was regularly caned."

Regular chastisement failed to quell his high spirits. Nor did it stifle his early, somewhat unorthodox entrepreneurial endeavours. When he was 15, GBM was expelled from school for selling "herbal products", at which point he fell in with "the wrong crowd" and moved into a squat. Fortuitously, so did a rogue Tandy TRS-80, with which he began to toy.

"At that time I was going through a reclusive phase, where I was doing nothing but fiddling with the computer and listening to music - I was keen on playing music, but didn't have the money to buy a musical instrument.

Then, one day, I met this guy in a pub who was into video games. We got chatting, I told him that I knew how to use a TRS-80. He said that he'd pay me z1,000 to write a TRS-80 version of Space Invaders. I didn't really know anything at all about programming but I went off and figured it all out. Then I wrote the Space Invaders game, gave this guy the tape and the source code, and he gave me z1,000 in cash. That's how I got into computers."

With the money earned here, plus some more pocketed for writing a couple of other video games, GBM bought a set of drums. These kept him occupied for a while. In time, however, he realised that banging them still wasn't enough. There remained a void in his life which, he realised, would have to be filled by "a proper job". So, persuaded by his parents, he left the squat for the post of lab assistant at the Open University in Milton Keynes.

"They wanted someone to work in their biology department. Now, it so happened that I'd already read up extensively on biology in my spare time and had kept pythons and lizards as pets. So, although I was by no means an expert, I had a fairly good background in the subject. At my interview, it turned out that one of the women on the interview panel was a herpetologist - a reptile specialist. I think that is what swung it for me."

Although billed as a research assistant, GBM's initial status was that of a grunt (his own word), responsible for clearing out Petri dishes, fetching cups of coffee and saying "Yes sir/No sir" as required. But in time, more responsibilities came his way and he became the lab's resident David Bailey. The Open University wanted to study the effects of radiation on fruit-fly maggots. GBM's job was to photograph them in their various stages of irradiated development. There was one problem, though: the fruit-fly's outer skin was difficult to photograph as it could not easily be detached from the innards. Some way had to be found to cleanly disembowel the thing so that it could be mounted on a slide.

"One day I came across some steak tenderiser - it works by breaking down meat proteins. I had the idea of injecting this into the fruit-fly so it would digest the insect from the inside, leaving its skin intact." It worked, and the Open University team were sufficiently impressed to persuade him to write up exactly how he'd done it for posterity. In time, the piece ended up at Nature magazine where it was published to great acclaim. From then on, scientists all over the world began addressing GBM as Dr Graham Brown-Martin. Overwhelmed by this adulation, he decided the time was ripe to move on.

"I didn't see myself as a biologist. I still had the idea of joining the music industry or being an astronaut. But it just so happened that during my time in the labs I'd been in contact with another group in the university called the Academic Computing Service (ACS). At this stage, I was still writing software in my spare time: someone told me that if I joined ACS I could do this sort of thing and get twice what the lab was paying me. So off I hopped."

ACS was about writing software for academics and helping them to use the technology. For a while, GBM was in his element. "It was at this time that the micros-in-schools thing, a DTI-funded scheme, was starting to happen. It was essentially three British computer firms, one of which was Research Machines. I was writing software for them and got to know the people at Research Machines, who offered me a job."

Which he took, along with a healthy allocation of (then) modestly priced shares in the company. Over the next five years, GBM worked in a number of different areas, including the much-hyped Domesday Project. This was a schools' project, to do with putting pictures and text onto video discs, a sort of "This is what it's like to live in the 20th century" sort of thing. It was GBM's first brush with what we now called multimedia, and he was hooked.

"I reckoned this was the future. I wanted Research Machines to do more work in this area but they weren't interested. It was at this point that I decided to call it a day. Besides, I didn't feel I could fit in there any more as the company had grown too big and become a little impersonal.

And I'd just got married to a 'power puppy' with shoulder pads who worked in the company's marketing department. It was time to move on."

When GBM sold his Research Machines' share allocation, he discovered that he was now a millionaire at the ripe old age of 22. Rather than not letting it change his life, he and his wife used the money to set up a company called Next Technology, the first in Europe to focus exclusively on interactive media. In due course, however, things began to turn sour: thanks largely to problems with suppliers, Next Technology eventually went under. As, concurrently, did GBM's marriage.

In 1991 he set up a company called ESP. "At the time, the music industry was being run by bean counters and largely sustained by releasing old tracks on a new format - CD. We had the idea of adding data and video to the CD to supply an interactive experience."

ESP produced a plethora of interactive music titles, featuring bands like U2, Nine Inch Nails, and The Shamen. On the back of this, GBM set up a record label (EXP) in partnership with Virgin, to promote something called "suburban breakbeat". But GBM and Virgin were actually dancing to two different tunes: he wanted to concentrate more on the interactive side, while Virgin was more interested in commercial, mainstream material.

So GBM sold ESP to Virgin and moved on.

The next company, his current one, is called Hypersonique. Based at London's Elephant & Castle, it doesn't look much at first sight. There's just one room, stuffed full of all the highest-tech computers, videos and other such peripherals imaginable. And there are just two employees: himself and his partner, Buggy G Riphead. Yet this is effectively a multinational organisation which produces pop videos, CDs, interactive CD-ROMs, books, artwork ... you name it. And quite recently, it beat off a challenge from George Lucas' Industrial Light & Magic to design a computer for the forthcoming film, Lost in Space. So with all these fingers in all these media pies, how come Hypersonique doesn't have a net presence?

GBM is highly dismissive of things internettish. "I believe it's a bit of a hoax. When you've been in the industry a while - any industry, not just computers - you see these things come up, surrounded by hype. It was the case with CD-ROM a few years ago when everyone was suddenly investing in it. So it is today with the internet. Yes, it sells magazines and newspapers, and there are lots of young people dressed in combat trousers putting homepages on it. But the idea that if you don't have a web site then you're going to go bust, is just so much bullshit. Very few people are making money as a consequence of having a presence on the web.

"Another problem is that it's so slow. Theoretically, you should have access to all the world's knowledge. But there's so much dross travelling up and down the internet, what with girlie .gifs and Uncle Tom Cobbley and all having enormous homepages, that it slows the whole system. Hypersonique doesn't have a web site, and we won't be adding to the glut. But we will get involved when the technology can deliver all the things we expect, stuff like full-motion video: none of this MPEG2 12fps garbage. But how long this will take, I don't know."

Back, then, to the things that Hypersonique is doing at the moment. Among them, the work for Lost in Space starring Gary Oldman, William Hurt and Hypersonique's specially designed computer. Or rather, its specially designed visual conception of a computer going through its calculations.

"The producers wanted a computer that was more funky than the flashing lights of HAL in 2001 - A Space Odyssey. So we had this idea for a cyber-organic creature that lives in what looks like an aquarium on the deck of the spaceship. It's a sort of visual representation of the computer's thought processes as it continually monitors everything going on in the ship."

The same sort of computer technology that went into the Lost in Space film project is also used by Hypersonique in other areas. For instance, while I was there, they were digitally processing a video tape of some singers in action. The original recording (a girl wearing angel wings and emoting into a microphone) looked pretty straightforward. But once the computer had finished with it, it took on a distinctly surreal, unearthly quality which apparently is in keeping with the group's style of music.

This, I was told, was destined to be an interactive title, Angels Landing, by the group Salt Tank.

Then there is a new concept called ultramedia. "It is another way of looking at information using different types of sensorial data. It could be graphics or it could be sound. Whatever. Think of the sum 2 x 2 = 4.

In itself, it means nothing; you're not experiencing anything from that calculation. But with ultramedia, you can assign a visual shape to the various numbers. So 2 x 2 = 4 will produce a different shape to 3 x 3 = 9. Or, on a higher level, you can show the progression of a number as it goes through a formula. What happens if you look up, say, the cosine of a number in a table? Nothing, you just get an answer and that's that.

But ultramedia will help show you why you're getting that answer. I'm not saying there's any practical application for this. It's simply another way of viewing and interpreting information."

For the future, GBM has no particular direction. He'll go where the technology leads. Whether he ends up creating interactive CDs, videos, or books, it's all the same to him. The bottom line is communication. "I'm enjoying being able to play with all these hi-tech toys and create some interesting work without having to produce a business plan. If they ever put a blue plaque on my wall to describe my life and what I did, I'd just like it to read: 'Graham Brown-Martin: Thinker'."