Exeter, 13 October 2006

Hi Gabriella

Perhaps it does not matter that we readers know who your figurine is. Perhaps it does; I actually didn't realise this missing bit of information, until I encountered with Trampoline's Gossip another view on the game. You call it a reduced version for publicity reasons, I saw a condensed version of your actions from another point of view and started wondering about your presence in the writing. I think this matters in a play, where you create your/a virtual persona. For me this is very much about your presence in the play, the presence of the virtual and the real places in your life and your reading of this fragmented (or scattered?), alternative landscape.

The gradual developing map of virtual places you go to and that you link with the different real places, is structurally similar to the Songlines, a combination of song, walk and landscape that spans an alternative map over Australia. Bruce Chatwin wrote somewhere in his book 'The Songlines' (1987) that Australia could be read like a score. The Aborigines use this mnemo technique to store and recall the myths of their ancestors. Only by actually performing the songline, through a 'singing walk' alongside landmarks charged with meaning, they tell the stories of their mythological forefathers. There seems to be no past and present, no here-and-now and thereafter, in the thinking of the Aborigines, both spheres are continuously intermingled in everyday life. I see this pattern of pervasiveness, of continuous awareness of the 'other' also in your writing. For example in the ongoing reflection about your relation to water and the sea, in the realm of the game city and of your 'material' surroundings.

I cannot write more today, since the Internet connection at home is down and I had to go to use the Library, which is on a Friday night no comfortable place to write. Once again I am aware how the use of this tool pervades (my new idée fixe!) life. Without it, I cannot work, not communicate, not even find out the bus times for Sunday's trip to the coast. Well, I shouldn't complain to you, since you are a laudable example of nomad computing at the moment.

All the best, Stefanie