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/>One of our favorite sites is "New">IS THIS YOU? from the U.K.  The other day we posed five questions
to “isityou”—Here are the responses. 

Wooster:. What was the
original inspiration for Is This You?

IsThisYou: I was
always fascinated with the randomness of living in London. You’d see the same
person twice on the tube, in completely different parts of town. You’d bump into
friends in completely unexpected places. And you constantly find bits ephemera
that would give incredibly personal insights into the lives of complete
strangers. One of the most common pieces of ephemera was photographs,
particularly passport photos. Pretty much everyone in London carries these (they
need them for their Travelcards). I kept picking them up. I soon became obsessed
with who these people were. Owning such an intimate image seemed almost unfair,
without giving them a chance to get them back.

Wooster. What
first got you started?

IsThisYou: I did a competition at
work to design a personal site. This was based on ephemera & stuff I’d found,
with text based on imagined stories about them and music loops—ripped-off Wu-
tang breaks, to be precise. As you can imagine, each page took about 3 weeks to
download. This gave me the spark of an idea though. I’d discovered how easy it
was to write your own site using free page making tools. I created the nascent
Is This You? site. Eventually, I progressed to buying the domain, then writing
the pages myself in Notepad. I’m even working on a ‘proper’ php-based version
with a savvy collaborator.

Wooster:  What other artists do you
most admire and why?

Anyone who’s interested in changing the
facelessness and anonymity of cities. Particularly "http://www.banksy.co.uk/" TARGET= "New">Banksy, and also "http://www.adamneate.co.uk" TARGET= "New">Adam Neate (who I think you
featured a while back), for leaving art on street corners for people to take
home. Also Mysterious
Al, who used to steal magazines, doctor them then put them back on the racks
the next day. And whoever started tagging central London with the words “Your
Mum Rang”.Also Joachim Schmid, found
photographer. And Dick Jewell, whose book “Found Photographs” is amazing.


Wooster:  What’s your favorite city, neighborhood, or block, to post
and/or to see street art?

IsThisYou: Brighton, where I
live now, is great. There’s a real artistic vibe—not just people trying to
promote websites or clubs, but activist art, stencils and bold graphics
everywhere. Some great graf too.

Wooster:  What inspires you
now?

IsThisYou: Not just running the site, but promoting
it, with stickers, posters and other guerilla tactics. Also, collaborating with
like-minded people all over the world.