__ The first thing you notice when you step into Allucquère Rosanne Stone's cramped, cluttered office at the University of Texas at Austin is the incredible range of interests she pursues. One look around the room and it's clear she takes the multi part of her work as seriously as the media. The walls are covered with posters promoting events she has been involved with - cyberspace conferences, architectural symposia, dance performances, art exhibitions, concerts, film festivals, and feminist gatherings. UFO stories clipped from tabloid newspapers compete for wall space with images culled from Tank Girl comics, and quirky pop-cultural artifacts litter every available centimeter of horizontal surface area. Sandy (as she's known in all but the most formal contexts) directs the University of Texas ACTLab, the radio-television-film department's interactive multimedia laboratory. Right above her desk is the jacket art for Sandy's new book, The War of Desire and Technology at the Close of the Mechanical Age (MIT Press). The book has burned up the charts, relatively speaking, for such an unapologetically cerebral piece of prose. It's as eclectic and searching as the fragments of life she plasters across her office walls. "Not a traditional text, but a series of intellectual provocations," the blurb on the cover warns us. Translation: the book is wild - a wickedly playful hot jazz jam session of ideas and insights into electronically mediated human interactions. It mixes sociological accounts of the early online BBS communities with anecdotes of high-tech high jinks at the Atari Lab. It contrasts multiple-personality syndrome with participating in a MUD and uses the case of a psychiatrist cross-dressing in cyberspace to raise profound questions about the future of gender and identity. The more you delve into Sandy Stone's work, the more you understand why she calls herself a "discourse surfer." She hangs ten and shoots the curls on the monster waves of hardcore science and high-cultural theory. Best of all, she takes her readers along for the ride. __
Stryker:You've worked in so many fields. Describe some of your early neurological work on hearing and vision.
Stone
:I did a series of experiments in the '60s with chronic implants - ones that stayed in place a long time. These for me are one of the mostfascinating things I've ever done. I connected the electrodes implanted in a cat's inner ear to a miniature stereo FM transmitter attached to its collar. I would let the cat wander around outside in the fields, then I would go to my receiver and put on the stereo headphones and "become" the cat. Cats don't hear like humans. Their hearing response curve is completely different, and they can hear right on up into the ultrasonic range. So, of course, I wasn't really hearing what a cat hears because my hearing doesn't extend into the ultrasonic, but I wasn't hearing like a human, either. At the upper frequencies of my hearing range, everything was so clear and loud. You could hear every grass blade. You could hear every insect walking. And, of course, you could hear the field mice off in the distance in stereo. I came to understand something about feline subjectivity. That for me was the beginning of my experience with communication prosthetics.
A transspecies experience - that's deep! It reminds me of those scenes in William Gibson's Neuromancer where the console cowboy is wired into Molly Million's full perceptual field.
In many ways, the cat with the transmitter and me with the headphones was the first actualization of what Gibson called "simstim." That experience has never left me. If the Sandy/cat link were two-way, neither of us would be what we'd been before. As it was, Sandy became more cat, but the cat didn't become more Sandy.
Isn't that something like a simple version of the Internet based on different components - genetically coded carbon molecules instead of mass-produced silicon chips?
With the Internet, of course, we've opened far more fascinating possibilities. But the whole discussion is an extrapolation of something that already existed before either Sandycat or the Internet. Multiple-user virtual communities are only the latest technological inflections of it. People in close proximity synchronize the ways they process symbols. On the one hand, this is just a long-winded way to say "culture." On the other hand, think of the way some old married couples become so attuned to each other that they finish each other's sentences. In lifelong dyadic partnerships, when one partner dies the other rarely survives for more than a year or two. That's something far more complex and much deeper than what we normally think of as "culture."
In the acknowledgments for your book you say you've been doing "this work" for a "relatively short time." It sounds as if you've been working in electronic communications for decades.
That's right, but I was referring to my current work in cultural studies of science and technology. My problem with working in the film and music industries and even the computer business was that we didn't have a common language for talking about the meaning of technology. There was simply no room for that kind of discussion when I was in those industries.
So you're making a distinction between working in high tech yourself and studying how that work is done by others, like an anthropologist fascinated with late-modern technical and scientific pursuits?
I moved into cultural studies because I found that the discipline was big enough to hold me. I could find ways in which all of those things fit together. The critical study of the technical fields I happen to have worked in - neurology and telephony, sound recording and computer programming - is terribly important because they're the sites of some of the fiercest contests raging today. Not just contests over markets, but over meanings. Whoever determines what technologies mean will control not merely the technology market but thought itself. That's scary.
What was some of your formative work in cultural studies like?
It started with a piece called "Sex and Death among the Cyborgs." I set out to write an essay on data compression when a bizarre thing happened and I wound up writing about phone sex. I
realized that phone sex was a practical application of data compression. Sex usually involves as many of the senses as possible - taste, touch, smell, sight, hearing. Phone-sex workers translate all those modalities of experience into sound, then boil that down into a series of highly compressed tokens. They squirt those tokens down a voice-grade line and someone at the other end just adds water, so to speak, to reconstitute the tokens into a fully detailed set of images and interactions in multiple sensory modes. "Sex and Death among the Cyborgs" was an utterly simpleminded attempt to explore boundaries and prosthetics and everything that interests me now.
What do you mean when you say "boundaries and prosthetics"?
Subjective boundaries and bodily boundaries. Remember the '80s pop psychology expression "bad boundaries" that referred to someone who had trouble keeping his or her thoughts and emotions separate from someone else's? They'd be very suggestible and have trouble acting on their own. That's one sense of a subjective boundary. Boundaries move around all the time. For example, where's the boundary of an individual human body? Is it skin? Is it clothes? It's different in different circumstances.
It's like sex, which is partly about shifting your bodily boundaries around and mingling with another body.
Right. In Desire and Technology, I use Stephen Hawking as an example of how body-boundary issues interact with technology. Because Hawking can't speak, he lectures with a computer-generated voice. When I speak, I sound different if you're in the room with me or if you hear me over the phone. But Hawking sounds exactly the same. The boundary between his human voice and communication technology has broken down. That's another kind of boundary. Hawking's computerized voice generator is also a prosthesis, from the Greek word for extension. It's an extension of his person. It extends his will across the boundaries of flesh and machinery, from the medium of air molecules in motion to the medium of electromagnetic force. Marshall McLuhan pointed out that communications media are extensions too, and that they interpenetrate us in ways we'd never anticipated and change us in ways we don't realize.
So when you talk about being interested in problems of "interface," "interaction," and "agency," you're not using these terms in their narrow computer-industry sense.
Exactly. At the close of the mechanical age, our consciousness
is deeply changed by the way we're immersed in communication technologies every waking, and perhaps sleeping, moment. We are already "transhuman." The boundaries between "us" and our prostheses - contact lenses, implants, artificial organs, serotonin reuptake controls, genetic engineering, communication networks - have become vague, and they shift continually.
What was it like to work as sound engineer for Jimi Hendrix?
Jimi could hear sounds in his head that required digital equipment to produce - technology that didn't exist yet. With analog machines we could only approximate what he wanted. The first time I worked with him I just sat at the board, shaking because of the power of the electronic connection. It was like holding on to electrodes, with the music flowing through me.
Then how did you end up involved with personal computers?
Shortly after Wozniak and Jobs started Apple, I found one of their prototype boards for the Apple II in a dumpster. I had no idea what it was. It was just this beautiful object. I put it up on my wall.
You first got your hands on a personal computer by dumpster diving?
Uh-huh. A few weeks later, a friend of mine who had gotten a job at Apple told me what it was. He agreed to steal some ROM so I could make it work. We scrounged up chips here and there. We found where the traces were defective and fixed them. We needed a power supply, which at this point was very proprietary. It was difficult, but eventually I had my own computer. I began writing programs. One day I accidentally fell into the disassembler and made this kind of intuitive symbolic connection to the machine. It was so intense. The wheels began to turn. I could see the planets moving and the atoms vibrating, and I could see mind with a capital M. I could reach down into the very soul of this thing. I could talk to it. It was this sense of, well, here was the physical machine and here was the virtual machine, the abstract machine. It was a living creature that I could reach into and feel the circuitry. I could feel what the code was like. And I wasn't the only person who experienced this. For many people who tended to be socially inept and quite shy anyway, the quasi-intelligent character of the machine has replaced human social interaction. The interactive potential of the machine has created a novel social category of what I call quasi guys.
Computer nerds, in other words.
Or, to be less prosaic, assemblages of machinic and human qualities that act like they're human - but just enough to produce the need for closure, the need to secure one's subjective boundaries and make a distinction between human and machine. And that can never happen finally and unproblematically, precisely because of the inherent connections between human and machine. So the desire is perpetually unfulfilled.
You treat desire as a movement across a boundary in the attempt to satisfy a need. If boundaries between humans and machines, or between species, or between the sexes, continue to shift or break down, is that the end of desire as we know it?
That's one of the big questions of transhuman theory and the area that currently most interests me - transgender theory.
You yourself are transgendered. Is that a form of reality hacking - you "change sex" by using for your own purposes the codes that regulate how we understand gender and the body?
The body is an instrument for involvement with others. It's a site for the play of language, a generator of symbolic exchange. The thing that generates the language of social interaction is first and foremost the human body. Body, language, consciousness - they are aspects of the same thing.
Themes of changing sex pop up everywhere in the media these days, especially in relation to cyberspace fantasies. Gibson has a lot of "trannie" stuff sprinkled throughout his work. Among a lot of really hip young hackers, genderfuck drag is now practically de rigueur. In the movie Hackers, the ultra-élite hackers who step in to save the day at the end of the film are these totally flaming queens. Why do you think high tech and transgender go together so easily?
Because people involved with high tech are frequently more inquisitive, more open to new experiences, and right now the cutting edge of new experience is transgender. It's a momentary thing, because the high-tech folk will age and become more conservative, and high tech itself will become more mainstreamed. But transgender will always be part of human culture. There will always be gendernauts.
I know a woman with several distinct personalities, some of which manifest only online. Where do those personalities go when this person's body isn't touching a keyboard that's plugged into the Net?
This is one of those Where does the candle flame go when it goes out? questions. The best analogy would be quantum theory. Identities appear and they disappear. They go from virtual to real, from real to virtual, crossing back and forth over those boundaries, sometimes predictably and sometimes not. So an easily intelligible answer to the question Where is that identity when it's off the Net? is to say it becomes virtual, or potential, during that time. The presence of the prosthesis in the communication network is what makes the virtual persona become real.
Isn't this just another way of saying that identity always emerges in interaction?
Yes. And it's another way of saying that identity is always multiple. Virtual environments allow the terms self and body to mean differently. I see in the new virtual worlds created by communication technologies the opportunity for a legitimization of some forms of multiplicity as well as transgender identity and other kinds of subjectivity that are stigmatized in the "real" world.
Sandy Stone's homepage is at www.actlab.utexas.edu/~sandy.
