Ivan Pope – writer, early internet pioneer, artist

A man who bought a house in rural France and is doing it up himself

Age?

I’m at that awkward age where it seems I have to ask will you still need me, will you still feed me? but I don’t know who I’m asking it of any more.

Where do you live?

I live in the Creuse which is La France Profonde, also known as the middle of nowhere. It’s the second least populated department of France, basically because there are no cities here so everybody young went to the North or the South. That said, the village, which has no shops or bars or anything, has new village hall and a salle polyvalent (a community centre), both of which are busy - the salle polyvalent recently hosted the rugby club party during which somebody broke into my caravan, so don’t think I live in a quiet backwater.

What do you do?

I moved to France because property is cheap and I’m a Frenchman. I’m renovating a very cheap house, barn, outbuildings and land and will build some studios and workshops for myself and others. I’m building a print workshop and aim to host visitors who want to learn some specific processes or to just make work. It’s early days yet, I’m doing it all myself. I’m desperate to finish the workshops but there is a hell of a lot to do in the acre of land and the house first, so we shall see.

Tell us what it’s like to be your age?

That’s a strange question to me. I’m not really aware of being an ‘age’ apart from feeling lucky that so far I’m as healthy and sane as I’ve ever been. The main thing I am aware of to do with age is that whatever I think inside my head, to others I’m an old geezer. For example, yesterday I got stuck in a dead end with my car and a very heavy trailer - I couldn’t back out. A bunch of young van drivers eventually came over and unshackled my trailer and moved it out of the way. It was a humorous incident and I thanked them all a lot but I had to remind myself that while I saw myself as one of them they would have thought they were helping out an old man. I’m not sure if I’m happy with that thought or not

What do you have now that you didn’t have at 25?

Everything.

In one way what I have now is a certain calmness, but that’s a recent thing, something I’ve been working on. To understand myself, how I got here, how I’ve come to be what I am. I’m not really sure what I am though.

Thinking about this, I feel I’ve been on a plateau since I was 25, I reached a plateau that year, I separated myself from what I’d been before and started on my new life. I’m still on that plateau, it’s an easy place to be because I’m just me, I go on as I am. My fear, I suppose, is that at some point the plateau must end, that I’ll have to go down again. And that is not a pleasant thought. So I’ll stay up here for as long as I can.

What about sex? And relationships?

I live alone in France, separated from almost everyone in a physical sense. My lifelong partner lives in our old house in Brighton. We seem very happy, the relationship is over forty years old and seemed to have run its course. We’ve had some difficult decades, now we are also plateaued. As for sex, nobody ever asked me that before. I’m not sure how to respond. I think of sex as a totality, as an engagement, as an art practice, as a slippery filthy engagement with all the senses. And I don’t have that. I would like to but I can’t work out how. To put it in practical terms, I would like to take a lover but I live in an empty landscape and see almost nobody. I would like to fall in love, to experience that plunge again, but who knows. I’m not going looking.

How free do you feel?

I think almost my entire plan, my whole aim, has been to free myself from the difficult constraints of having to act or behave in a way that other people want me to behave. I’ve never really understood that. It’s not that I think I am difficult, but it seems I am. I didn’t have any grand notion of liberating myself from anything - I’ve never been one for mysticism or religion and I’m certainly not a hippy. I just spent a lot of years trying to be something to fit in and now I’m happy that there’s nobody to watch over me, to tut at my stranger behaviours. I guess that’s what being an artist means in the end, freedom to let it happen.

What are you proud of?

I’m proud of my children. That sounds like a corny or obvious answer, but I’m proud of the way they are in the world, how utterly modern they are. Also, I’m proud that they came through their teenage years without any catastrophes. My teenage years and those of all my friends were a maelstrom of boundary broaching and chaos and I fearfully anticipated dealing with all that myself, but it never happened.

I’m proud of most of the things I did along the way. I never got any credit or praise, nobody seemed to notice, but I imagined new worlds and brought them into being. I mixed art and businesss, I invented the Cybercafe, I invented the domain name industry. I don’t get the feeling that people think these are things to be proud of but fuck it, I did it - you didn’t.

What keeps you inspired?

My brain invents things for me to do every day of the week and so long as I can do them I’m happy. For years I worried that one day I would wake up with no new ideas and that I feared more than anything. To be technical, my search for dopamine keeps me inspired, but really it’s what other people are doing, the strange edgeland abnormal creative stuff that flows on and on all around the world but which the world doesn’t acknowledge.

When are you happiest?

I’ve never really been unhappy in the same way that I’ve never disliked Mondays. I seem to have invented a space and life now that is an endless sequence of things for me to do - not sure this will last forever but for the time being it is perfect.

And where does your creativity go?

Everything I do is creative or, to put it another way, I don’t do things that don’t feed my creative drive. I’m renovating my house and land in France and eventually I’ll build new workshops and get on with experimental printmaking and other art practices, but for the time being I have nowhere to work and all my stuff is still packed away. What happens? The process of making a house and a landscape becomes my art, I can’t help it nor would I want to. I don’t think of it as art in a conscious way, but it flows out of me as creativity.

What’s your philosophy of living?

I’m an anarchist existentialist, I have been since I was a teenager. If you asked me what that meant I wouldn’t have a ready reply. I’m not a joiner of clubs or movements. But I think that in life you have to be yourself but love the world. My worldview can be summed up as ‘Man is alone on a godless planet, he has made himself what he is and has to be what he is.’

And dying?

I’m not bothered by dying, never have been. I don’t fear death though I might fear the manner of dying. I know it could come at any moment but I’d rather hang on to this life for a bit longer, I’m loving it so much. I briefed my kids from quite a young age not to worry if I died somehow, that I wouldn’t mind and that I’ve loved my life. I feel so grateful for it, I’ve been lucky, so lucky, born after the last world war, brought up in an age of plenty and no fascism, allowed to be a pain in the arse, coddled through college, watched and engaged with the birth of punk, the rebirth of art (if you can call the YBA generation that), the coming of the internet. The world is very different now - I was born on the same day as the Berlin wall but now look at the world. So I don’t mind dying, I just fear for my kids and their future because there are some right idiots in power around the world. Sometimes I want to tell them not to have kids, but how can I do that?

Are you still dreaming?

I guess I dream of the things I’m going to do next, I’ve always had plans though they are made in my head - I think that is a definition of dreaming. As I said, every day I wake up eager for the world. So long as that continues, I am dreaming.

What was a recent outrageous action of yours?

I did a PhD when I was 60, I think that’s pretty fucking outrageous.

If you want to follow Ivan’s adventures, his YouTube channel is https://www.youtube.com/@ivanpope