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


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Gypsum

Page 55

A week before I leave for Los Angeles I take a walk on the edge of the village where I live in the Midlands of England. I choose an ancient pack-road broad enough for two carts to comfortably pass, and fringed with a pot-pourri of hedging and trees, some of which are centuries old. Today is the first frosty day of autumn and the ground is hard underfoot, patches of mud encrusted with ice and spears of grass frosted by crystal. The bare foot-printed earth is also studded with fragments of silvery gypsum, each one glinting like a cheap jewel in the pallid autumn light.

From up here I gaze eastwards towards wooded hills tumbling gently away in a confusion of complicated greenery. This complexity is not accidental. It’s designed to hem the rough edges of a large and well-tended golf-course, and as I look more closely I can see swathes of smooth turf opening out beyond the young oaks and sycamores.

Just beside me, holes in a tangled hawthorn hedge reveal shapes moving in and out of view. Only segments. The hedge won’t allow entirety. One moment a tail, then a rump, then a head. Sometimes eyes looking directly at me. Also long gaps of nothing. There are light brown segments, and black segments. It is likely, but not certain, that they belong to different bodies. Gaps in the lower hedge allow more than the matted branches at head height. Occasionally a taller thinner figure – human – passes across the spaces in the distance.

Turn to the north, and my gaze is immediately tugged downwards to a flat glacial plain, every square metre seamed with newly-ploughed furrows at this time of the year, and the whole extent nibbled across by Fairham Brook, a meandering stream which from a distance is barely noticeable in the unfeatured landscape.

To the west, the village – a spread of post-war houses with greying roofs and white painted walls, each long garden lawned and trimmed with privet, and beyond them the older cottages coiled around the church spire like a snake in its nest. Just outside the village is the source of everyone’s pay-packet, catalyst for the building of the council estate once called Tin Town by the locals - a series of long single-storied sheds, powdered with white dust - the gypsum works.

The sky begins to fade and soon it will be dark. From up here I can just make out the eddying white dust along the margins of the road below, and the faint noise of heavy lorries entering and leaving the plant. There is a humming of machinery too, making a steady undertone to the rustling breeze and the goodnight calls of wood-pigeons. In the weakening light the pale gypsum glints up from the footpath and I stoop to harvest a lump from the soft mud. I rub off some powder with my finger-nail and blow the tiny glittering crystals out into the darkening air. Some stick to the skin of my palm and without thinking I lick them off. They scatter instantly on my tongue.


The Midlands village mentioned above is East Leake, on the Nottinghamshire/Leicestershire border. Borders, being not one thing or the other, or often both, have excellent potential for virtuality.

Posted by Sue Thomas on Apr 14, 2004 at 11:08 PM in 08 Electricity | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

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Technobiophilia: Nature and Cyberspace

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  • 02 Hello World (3)
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