first site

a few years ago, before blogging set in, melbourne theatre company sent boynton a list of www sites on Angels to look up. Being as yet unconnected and a total techno dummy, boynton took this list as a sign that this was indeed the new standard of research, without access to which she could not function as a playwright. So she went to an old Victorian primary School at night, through the door that said "have you remembered your Hat manners", and steathily climbed the stairs, high with children, reputedly haunted, watched in the distance by an elderly vicar/caretaker - and under the modern cursive collages and alongside small chairs, she followed the mysterious instructions which led to a 'handshake" of modem connection - and from that moment was hooked. This was the old encylopaedic transcendental flow of associative thinking. As we all know, this was wandering off on tangents and memories and loose threads of data. etc. Of course there was much marvellous procrastination to attend to that night before looking up Angels. There was Gorillas. This was the first site she ever looked up, though of course it has since changed - as the numbers decline. She had been reading up on the so-called Louis Leakey triumverate of primatologists Jane Goodall, Diann Fossey and Birute Galdikas, but it was the story of Digit (that had made her cry in a public library) which marked the official digital handshake. It's hard to know how accurate or how fresh the figure of 650 on the gorilla splash page is, but elsewhere, with chimpanzees and orangutans the relentless drive towards habitat loss and extinction continues.
She eventually got round to the Angels, and the first glimpse of the eclectic mix of the hand made home page - the ethereal and commercial within all the tiled backgrounds, animated gifs and midi files. After two hours of surf time, boynton crept back down the stairs and across the dark courtyard overseen by possums and priests and took a linear path back to the car. But there began this rather strange journey down the hyper-textual, extra-temporal, multi-linear highway. And this was a good four years before blogging got her.

(for kaleidoscope)