Hello World

Hello World

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Books (single author, editor, contributor)

  • 2013 Technobiophilia: Nature and Cyberspace
  • 2012 In the Flesh: Twenty Writers Explore the Body
  • 2009 Handbook of Research on Social Software and Developing Community Ontologies
  • 2008 Transdisciplinary Digital Art: Sound, Vision and the New Screen
  • 2004 Hello World: Travels in Virtuality
  • 2002 Reload: Rethinking Women and Cyberculture
  • 2000 Inhuman Reflections: Rethinking the Limits of the Human
  • 1999 The Noon Quilt
  • 1998 Crossing The Border
  • 1995 Creative Writing : A Handbook for Workshop Leaders
  • 1994 Wild Women: Contemporary Short Stories by Women Celebrating Women
  • 1994 Water
  • 1992 Correspondence
  • 1990 Where No Man has Gone Before: Essays on Women and Science Fiction

Snippets from the past

  • 2012 Traces of the trAce Online Writing Centre 1995-2005 | Jacket2
  • 2005 trAces: A Commemoration of Ten Years of Artistic Innovation at trAce
  • 2005 trAce Online Writing Centre Archive
  • 2004 Sistema Purificacion
  • 2003 Spivak
  • 2002 Writing Machines by N.Katherine Hayles
  • 2002 Tools of the trade
  • 2002 Stephanie Strickland: Living in the Space between Print and Online
  • 2002 No visible means of support
  • 2002 A New Sensibility? The qualities of a new media writer
  • 2001 Interview by 3am Magazine
  • 2000 lux : notes for an electronic writing
  • 2000 Evolving Practice: writers working online with trAce
  • 2000 Correspondence @ Riding the Meridian
  • 2000 ::::::In Place of the Page::::::
  • 1999 Tremble
  • 1999 The [+]Net[+] of Desire
  • 1999 Noon Quilt
  • 1999 Interview by Full Circle
  • 1998 Sharing a common language online
  • 1998 Land: Textual MOO-based virtual landscapes
  • 1998 Imagining a stone: virtual landscapes
  • 1998 Ensemble Logic + Choragraphy
  • 1998 Creative interaction in cyberspace
  • 1997 Revolver


  • Creative 

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    This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License. Unless otherwise expressly stated, all original material of whatever nature created by Sue Thomas and included in this weblog and any related pages, including the weblog's archives, is included in this License.

Heat and the West Coast

Page 49

The West Coast of the US is the crucible of new ideas about virtuality and I wanted to be there. What began as a progressive technology has also become a progressive philosophy. I wanted to feel the heat of that thinking.

Several of my books have featured scenes or items that were invented at the time but later appeared to come into reality. In this case, the above paragraph was simply an exposition of my thinking about California. And yet in April 2004 I found myself signing up for a workshop at Esalen, my first, and of all the topics I might have chosen, I decided on Bronze Casting, simply because it was so far from my usual experience.

And here, without any planning or expectation, I found myself experiencing my first crucible. We built a firepit bronze_pour.jpg
and placed inside it a crucible filled with bronze, to be melted and poured into the casts we had made. Unexpectedly, I was working with a crucible, and as we sat around the fire together that night, bronze_fire.jpg high up on the cliffs in Big Sur, listening to the crackle of the burning wood and the boom of the Pacific waves below us, I certainly felt the heat.

Posted by Sue Thomas on Apr 17, 2004 at 01:08 PM in 06 Thoreau | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

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the kind of VR the brain produces all on its own

Page 43

In Walden, Thoreau describes how in his imagination he bought several farms, although in reality he never owned any at all. He explains how he worked so hard to imagine landscapes, buildings and harvests that he was able to fantasise entire sagas of negotiation, purchase and sale. Even without money or legal ownership of a piece of land he still ‘annually carried off what it yielded without a wheelbarrow’. In other words, his ability to simply savour a landscape enabled him to reap a valuable harvest – the sheer imagined experience of it. ‘I have frequently seen a poet withdraw, having enjoyed the most valuable part of a farm, while the crusty farmer supposed that he had got a few wild apples only. Why, the owner does not know it for many years when a poet has put his farm in rhyme, the most admirable kind of invisible fence, has fairly impounded it, milked it, skimmed it, and got all the cream, and left the farmer only the skimmed milk.’ (1) If it existed in his brain, it was real.

Virtual Reality has always been a part of our experience. It is where we are when we think, when we meditate, when we imagine, when we remember. It is a place where we all have been and indeed where we will all end up. After all, what could be more virtual than the unvisited and yet fully imagined place we call Heaven? But let us define our terms. Maybe you’re thinking of people wearing gloves and goggles and navigating their way across an apparently empty room? Well, that’s not the kind of VR I’m talking about.

I’m talking about memory, imagination, hopes and inventions.

I’m talking about the kind of VR the brain produces all on its own.

(1) Henry David Thoreau, Walden (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). 76.

Posted by Sue Thomas on Apr 14, 2004 at 10:49 PM in 06 Thoreau | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

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06 Thoreau's ideas

Page 44
My guide during that first trip to the Mojave Desert was the hypertext writer M.D.Coverley whose work Califia is an epic story of California's history, myths and legends told in hypertext, music and images.

Posted by Sue Thomas on Mar 03, 2004 at 02:12 PM in 06 Thoreau | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

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About

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Technobiophilia: Nature and Cyberspace

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Categories

  • 00 About the book (2)
  • 00 About the web view (1)
  • 00 Acknowledgements (2)
  • 00 Cover (1)
  • 00 Foreword (4)
  • 01 Imagining (5)
  • 02 Hello World (3)
  • 03 Shapes (4)
  • 04 Geographies (4)
  • 05 Bachelard (2)
  • 06 Thoreau (3)
  • 07 Links (3)
  • 08 Electricity (1)
  • 09 The Indian Pacific (1)
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  • 11 Riding the train (1)
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  • 16 Anxiety (3)
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  • 31 Virtuality (2)
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  • Nature and Cyberspace (1)
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  • ~ Win a copy [archived] (2)
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