Well, I leave London, thankfully taking a taxi with Joanna to the Underground station — she was heading out for a meeting her Open University students, and I am carrying the full compliment of my belongings because I go direct from Bath to Heathrow for the flight to Iceland tomorrow morning. I transferred at Paddington Station to a train to Bath, arriving after some delays around 1330. Taxi to the Bloomfield Hotel (the organizers of the digital chaos cyber conference are covering my expenses — other wise I could not have afforded to even come out to the conference — thanks!). Rail tickets here are expensive like in the US, and I am rapidly running out of money. I am afraid that each time I use my Visa card it will be rejected or so. I drop my bags and with the sun strong enough for me to break a sweat, I walk into the center of town to find the Hub Intercafe, the headquarters of the Conference, where I meet Stella who gives me a Mac to play on while waiting for Johanna Nicholls and Heath Bunting to show up from a meeting. Still had trouble logging into my home server in Reykjavík, but I finally succeeded after remote-logging into one in Colorado, dropping into the Unix shell there and connecting from there to Reykjavík. Don’t ask my how or why it worked when a direct connect didn’t … Not too much mail had built up, but it was good to check it anyways. Heath and Johanna showed up shortly, and I met a few other of the digitalchaos crew — Stanley Donwood, Stella (the hostess at the Café when I arrived) and so on … Heath was interviewed on the radio by telephone at the Hub, and after that I had a beer with Johanna then took a leisurely stroll around Bath as there were a couple hours to kill before the evenings activities.
We have flown through the air like birds and swum the sea like fishes — But have yet to learn the simple act of walking the earth as brothers. — Martin Luther King
For the dinner convocation that I called for the evening, I make a very short toast that began with a quotation from the German writer and activist Martin Buber and continuing along the lines:
I would propose that we seek to consummate and consecrate the possibilities of technologically mediated communication through the power of this genuine dialogue. Let this Dialogue begin! Bon Appetit! I wish you good speaking from the heart!
Heath did put up a small gallery of some of the participants at the festival (I’m the last to the right on the first row…), but this poor shred of cyberspace has long since vanished.