dialogue 3 with Leslee Broersma, February 19 1997

Well, here you are looking for dialogue which you do not find. I suppose I shouldn't be so surprised myself. Leslee and I ended up not making contact except by telephone towards the end of the time-slot for the project. I logged into the irc-2.mit.edu server on the EFnet IRC network, and seemed to have a stable connection (after a week of struggling with dirty/noisy phone lines locally that did not allow me a decent connection that would stay up for more that a minute or two, if it even connected at all). Robbin showed up (from his home in NYC) around 1400 EST and we waited for Leslee and Remo to show up. Twenty minutes into it, I decided to call Remo at the gallery to see where they were, and it turned out that they were connected with Leslee on the irc.ais.net and irc.Colorado.edu servers -- which are both supposed to also be part of the EFnet network. Apparently the network has further broken down, or it simply experiences breakdowns on a regular and random basis. My feeling is that it is just getting more unstable each day. I tried to join Leslee and Remo, but because I am logging in from a small local ISP (Internet Service Provider), my domain is not recognized and I am consequently "not authorized" to connect to most servers. I don't know if this is a factor where my ISP needs to pay some additional fee to be "authorized" or whether the EFnet server administrators just have a long list of who to keep off for whatever reason. Whatever the case, I never got entry to any one of the possible servers on the EFnet network fragment that Leslee and Remo were on. Robbin did get in for a time, but then had trouble with his IRC client software and bombed out...

Anyway. That's what happened. I had to make a number of phone calls to Remo to track things, and I ended up calling Leslee near the end of the "performance." We may schedule a dialogue at a later date to try to recover something. I guess Leslee and Remo enjoyed each other's company, but the contents of their dialogue shall remain immaterial only to reverberate in the virtuality of cyberspace... More next week...

A late addition to the story, I did discover the next day, when in at work at the ISP (Internet Service Provider) I am webmaster for, that there was a main backbone line that MCI owns down for most of Wednesday which caused massive breakdowns and traffic jams on the entire web/net... Makes sense. Even the shoppers/merchants were affected as much of the Visa network was in chaos...