Sue Thomas
I am joining this group at a time which I suspect is very significant for me, and I would like to thank brigid for inviting me. This is just what I need right now.
I am (or was) essentially a novelist. My first novel, Correspondence, came out in 92, and was an exploration of 'machineness' or machine consciousness, much inspired by the work of Marvin Minsky and others. After that, I worked almost exclusively in the area of what I would call writing about inorganics (my 2nd novel was called Water and was about just that). I wrote various other stuff but my most significant book in the last few years will never be published. Called The [+]Net[+] of Desire, it was about virtual life, about MOOing, and about multiple and free identity. It will never be published because it suffered from some very vital faults which I am disinclined to repair.
Anyway, I have always been a kind of fringe novelist - too experimental for genre SF and too SF for experimental! Stuck in the borders, as usual : ) But since discovering the internet in 94/5 and then discovering MOOing in mid 95, I have found myself veering more and more towards the experimental and less and less inclined to do 'straight' writing, to the extent that recently I decided I would in fact stop writing fiction all together and concentrate on 'nonfiction' - whatever that is. My teachers in MOOing were the Oz cyberfeminist group VNS matrix, esp gashgirl (francesca da rimini). With them I learned about the twists and turns our personalities can take on in cyberspace, and I learned that text does not have to be one word sequentially after another. I also learned to be brave. Anyway suffice it to say and without boring you to death, my work has taken some strange turns in the last 5 years and now I am on the cusp of something very different - I just don't know what it is. What i do know is that every time my direction has changed it has been at the instigation of others pointing me in a direction i had not seen before, so it is no surprise really that the markers have all been invitations which came almost out of the blue:
Markers include:
* An invitation to write for the theatre company Doo-Cot, with whom I have been working for the whole of february (our final performance is tomorrow night). They have been resident - living - in the Arena Theatre, Wolverhampton, UK, and they employed me as their virtual writer. We have been working at lambdaMOO all month, exploring the making of new life in a project called Outer Body with Bush Hartshorn as our dramaturg. I have much enjoyed this because it is all new to me - writing for theatre is new; working in a group is new; working with such wide open imaginations is new. It has been very exciting.
* An invitation to write for a gallery piece - LUX: notes for an electronic writing: "lux celebrates a reading writing practice that generates an electric relationship between the text, the reader, writer and the physical space. What is the writing that happens when one looks away, from reading?" Teri Hoskin, the curator, requested enough writing to fill 4 sheets of A4, which she then printed out and exhibited in a very interesting fashion, and then published as a book. Although all the writing was about electracy, it was exhibited in a plain white room with no hardware anywhere to be seen.
http://ensemble.va.com.au/lux/index.html
* An invitation to speak at the Adelaide Festival in Verve: the other writing http://www.vervewriting.org/ I am speaking about 'living the new life' - about the people I work with every day, people like yourselves who I may never see or meet and yet whose heads join mine in the building of new work. But adelaide is also a very personal trip for me - my first time in Oz; my first meeting with Teri Hoskin, with whom I have worked online for 3 years now, and with whom I have worked on a website The Noon Quilt and a book of the site. But it is also a chance to stop working and to just absorb, think, talk, collect new ideas and impressions. The second week I am there I will be in an event which takes place under a tree! Women talking together about new technologies. Doesn't that sound like bliss?!
* And an invitation to work with you all on this project. I like the fact that so many of you are performance-based rather than straight text-based, and I expect to learn a lot from you.
At present I am getting ready for my trip - I leave on Sunday. And my plan for 'in place of the page' is this: I am going to take it with me - all your emails on my laptop, and the paper materials that Brigid sent me. I will work on it as I travel, lacing all those new places into the single page I received in the bundle, and reworking it into something else. I will probably rework the text as in tom phillips' humament. As I travel, I expect to be changing too and I hope to reflect that in the work. I am thinking of taking a long train journey from Adelaide to Perth - 2 days on the train, mostly through desert. I plan to stare out of the window, and think, and write. And part of what I write will be 'in place'.
Lastly, I should add that I have a real life job too - I am director of trAce, an international writers' network with members in 99 countries. Our place is our website, that is where trAce and all its people live a virtual life together, working and talking and having Grand Ideas! (the site is down tonight, sadly - a rare but embarrassing occurrence! - the url is http://trace.ntu.ac.uk and it will be back online tomorrow at 9 o'clock sharp!) and we are running the conference Brigid mentioned in her first mail - Incubation, on writing and the internet http://trace.ntu.ac.uk/incubation/ which I hope some of you will make it to.
My own site is as
http://trace.ntu.ac.uk/suethomas/
Lastly, I look forward to working with you all - I think this will be an exciting experience for me.
Sue
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