Technology in the hands of Sandy Stone

SANDY STONE photo by cecilia andersson

This interview was published in Art Orbit #3 www.artnode.se/artorbit

CA: How come you developed a relationship with this type of technology?

SS: I have always been interested in technologies of different kinds. I have talked with my colleagues, we have talked about weather or not that¥s a gender characteristic that I have because I lived so many years of my life first as a boy, and then as a man, and maybe boys are raised in a different relationship to technology. I am inclined to think that is not the case with me. I meet women who have been interested in technology all of their lives too. There is something fascinating about being able to relate to things that you know you have constructed, but in the process of constructing them, you have put some of yourself into them in a way that you put some of yourself into a work of art and because I don´t really agree with the boundaries between technology and art. When I deal with a technological object I think of it as an artwork too.

"He said "Where did you get that?!", I said I found it in the garbage. He said "Do you know what it is?", I said no. It turned out to be a mother board for an Apple II computer and no one was supposed to have access to it."

CA: But on a very abstract level? It´s not like building lego?

SS: I can think of one particular example. This example makes me laugh because it is something that both I and Sherry Turkle have studied, so to hear myself say the things that the people I study say I find this a little funny but when I think about my first connection with computers it was an accidental thing. I got a computer because I came into possession of a mother board. It had no parts on it, it was just the board and I thought of it as an art object and put it up on the wall. I found it in a garbage can in Silicon Valley. I had no idea what it was. This was 1979, I think. It was hanging on my wall and someone who worked for Apple computer came over to visit and saw it and his eyes got as big a grapes. He said "Where did you get that?!", I said I found it in the garbage. He said "Do you know what it is?", I said no. It turned out to be a mother board for an Apple II computer and no one was supposed to have access to it. I called Apple computer and asked for a manual. Someone answered the phone immediately, Apple was very small, and they sent me the manual. I still have it, it´s a wonderful hand typed relic and in it it had a drawing of the circuit board showing where the chips were so I was able to go out and find them. At that time it was very difficult to find. I went around Silicon Valley, chips here and there, and I brought them back and put the chips in the sockets. Also, I had to build a powersupply which I discovered later was Apple´s most closely guarded secret. It was a miracle because it worked when I turned it on!

CA: I like how you in the beginning of your book ("The War of Desire and Technology at the Close of the Mechanical Age", MIT Press 1995) talk about the self, from sitting on the bench to sitting on individual chairs and how we have shaped the self in these different stages. Could you talk a little bit about that?

SS: There has been, as we look at the evolution of people in space, a development from benches to individual chairs and chairs have deep symbolic value for us. Originally only the king could sit in a chair, everyone else sat on benches. Not only because they were cheap and easy to make, but also because they symbolized the fact that only the king had a self, an agency. It was the person who had the power over life and death and who possessed the mighty everything. Everyone else was apart of that identity or had no identity at all. The sociologist Steve Shapin pointed out that when Thomas Hobbes had his big fight with Robert Boyle, near the time of the founding of the Royal Society in London, Hobbes was upset over Boyles presentation of the air pump as a scientific tool. According to Hobbes, it wasn´t only a scientific tool, it was a device that shook the whole foundations of society. Only the sovereign could produces truth and here was a machine, acting like the king. Now, we have come to accept that machines produce truths. But anyway, your question about the transition from benches to chairs, we have also gone from houses that where one large room to houses with gradually more and more specialized rooms. This also involves economics of scale which tells us something about how we deal with our own identities in space.

CA: Now I see for example ATT and other phone companies, how their products are becoming actions but actions that we don´t really have an actual relationship to. "Tuck in your child from the beach" or "Open your mail over the phone". This is something I find confusing and interesting.

SS: This is a problematic thing as well as a useful thing. What we are doing in a way is symbolically recreating the servants, the class of slaves. We talk a lot about ancient Greek civilization, about the brilliant thinkers of that time, but Greek society lived on its slaves. Slavery has gone out of fashion and now we have mechanical delegates who act as if they were humans to do things that humans would otherwise do. We build them, we program them, but it´s not really quite the same because ultimately they do not have the depth and breath of a human. So this is quite a different situation when you tuck your child in from the beach, this is not the same as touching. In the early experiments of the behaviorists, one of the things that came up was the terry cloth mother in which a group of scientists raised three monkey babies. One with his mother, the second with a terry cloth (a cloth representation of a mother), and a third with no mother at all. They observed them to see what would happen and they found out something which of course we knew before they did the experiment, that the terry cloth mother was good but it was nowhere near as good as the real mother. And there are some very touching photographs of this experiment. I think that photographs that represent scientific activity are dangerous because they always only tell part of the story. Here was a picture of this poor little monkey clinging to the terry cloth mother and looking out at the camera. Of course the picture had been taken in a way, and at a time, where it was clear that this monkey was deranged. In the same way, it is not the same when you tuck your child in with an electronic device as if you were there.

"Every time someone says "I dont think that´s a fit partner for you" we´re doing genetic engineering. Now, we just have the ability to do it better."

CA: About photographs being dangerous, I think you mention in your book how we have looked upon ourselves through the history of photography. How photography was one way of talking about the undivided individual but now that individual has become "dividual"?

SS: That is a very good term. In the first place the idea of photography itself has undergone a change. When digital photographic techniques first appeared in the 1980s there was an article on the front page of a magazine in the US called "Whole Earth Review" that showed flying saucers landing on the streets in S.F. and the caption underneath said "The end of photography as evidence for anything". That speaks to this too because it was also the end of photography as the mirror of the human self in the simple way that we used to think of it.

CA: I am thinking that currently the human self is under scrutiny. For example, let´s say genetics. Scientific communities now think they have access to what we are made of. A language is constructed that are becoming us. How are we going to deal with this?

SS: This is not something new, although quite suddenly it´s visible because of the way in which the current experimentation in genetic engineering made its way into the popular attention, but we have been doing genetic engineering for as long as we have been a species. Every time someone says "I dont think that´s a fit partner for you" we´re doing genetic engineering. Now, we just have the ability to do it better. The questions haven´t changed and obviously everyone feels differently about this. We are able to do it better, faster, and cheaper now and this raises serious issues, but they are not new issues at all. In the first place, we are at the very beginning of this. It looks very mysterious, it raises legitimate and terrible ethical questions and it sounds very new in the public sense. We don´t know very much about it in depth and the more we find out, the more the complexity is going to become clear. At the moment, the one thing that makes them so intense is that they look so binary. They aren´t really, they just look binary. We can now make an altzheimer´s gene visible and an insurance company in the US can say well, we are not going to insure you because you have an altzheimer gene. But this is a momentary debate. Then we come up with a way to remove the altzheimer´s gene and with the accompanying issue, should we do that? We can sit here and just spin out the issues for ever. Each time we come to one of these issues, we´ve done some work around. We have rarely, if ever, come up with a brilliant moral, ethical, or technical solution to the problem. We have certainly found a way to go on with life.

Each time we think we´ve got it figured out, it turns out that we forgot one little thing and that one little thing turns out to be very big and then we realize we didn´t have it at all. It´s the same with genetics in that right now we think we´re on the verge of some huge human change, well yes, but no.

CA: For me it is as if the individual is implied more than ever before. Almost caught, as if they´ve got its essence.

SS: May I point out a parallel example, artificial intelligence, it´s my favourite one. You may recall that for instance the natural language recognition started out as a weekend exercise for a graduate student. The professor thought that it was so easy, we should just get it out of the way, so he sent the graduate students home over a long weekend and said "Go home and solve natural language recognition, write a program that would recognize printed english and translate into computer commands". The students went home and discovered that it couldn´t be done and then came back to the professor "What do you mean you couldn´t do this?". The students said it couldn´t be done and since then we have tried, we still can´t do it. We thought that we were getting very far in artificial intelligence, thought a lot of problems were solved and it would only be a matter of time before we could solve the remaining ones. Then it turned out that the remaining ones were infinite. And it turned out that the representation form of artificial intelligence was discredited, and then came the neural model form of a.i. and that doesn´t work very well. And now, we have the bottom-up model and that doesn´t work very well. Each time we think we´ve got it figured out, it turns out that we forgot one little thing and that one little thing turns out to be very big and then we realize we didn´t have it at all. It´s the same with genetics in that right now we think we´re on the verge of some huge human change, well yes, but no.

CA: But it´s the level they operate on to get funding.´

SS: Sure, in the first place it is very gratifying to talk about it in those terms. Secondly, it does give lots of money. But this is like grabbing hold of a soap covered pole and you slide down into the realm of the social construction of innovation. The reason this problem looks like it does is that it mobilizes many powerful allies. Money, government, business, and the interest of the public. At the centers of these bodies of interests we construct this thing that we call genetic engineering. There is this company in the US, Toys R Us and the thing about genetic engineering, if you think about it, it seems like genetic engineering are us.

"They will get down to something very cheap and when it gets that cheap, we will make life on our desk tops. And if you think we´ve got problems now, wait until you come home and your daughter has made something strange with green tendrils sticking out."

CA: Did you know there is yet another company, Genes R Us? Their logo is written in kind of bulky colorful letters. You can order DNA base pairs from them.

SS: Yes, Toys R Us gets very upset about that. They feel their trademark is being infringed. You know, the only thing that stops us from creating life on our desk tops right now is that base pairs costs one dollar a piece and you need a million of them to make a simple organism. But base pairs won´t always cost one dollar. They will get down to something very cheap and when it gets that cheap, we will make life on our desk tops. And if you think we´ve got problems now, wait until you come home and your daughter has made something strange with green tendrils sticking out.

CA: Don´t you think, and this is pure speculation, but the search for life on Mars and Venus, isn´t that being done in order to prepare us mentally for these possibilities? If we start now, projecting the idea that there are such things as new life forms, we don´t know them yet but they are out there.

SS: Yes, I believe that too. It is a way of loosening up our symbolic structures so that we are ready for other things. Arthur C Clarke had a strange and wonderful variation of that in a book called "Childhoods End". Part of what happens in the book is that we meet the real beings from the stars, the other intelligences. They hide themselves from us physically, we never see them for a long time. Finally, they feel that we are ready. They have demonstrated to us their compassion, their wisdom, their sense of caring for what humanity is and so they allow themselves to be seen and they look like the classical representation of the devil. Right down to the pointy tail. Ultimately what happens in the book is you discover that the idea of a devil as a deeply buried memory is something we have from the beginning of humanity. We know that what they represent is the end of humanity. But what they are actually here for is to help us through the next transition as kindly as they can, through the next transition to the post human which means the end of humanity as we know it.

CA: Carl von Linné, the Swedish botanist, in his naming of nature excluded many species that formerly existed, at least in peoples minds. There were no more frogdog or tailed human, they were simply sorted out as a way of cleaning up which also leads us to look upon the world in a different way.

SS: Yes, there is as we continue that human activity of naming, as we make things visible, another world goes away. I was also thinking this in terms of maps. I was recently in Portugal for an event there in which we discussed Prince Henry the Navigator and the act of mapping. There was a period when the images of the seamonsters that were previously on the maps disappeared, a point where the world began to take a physical shape and there were certain creatures that could not live there anymore. There is something lost and something gained, and its hard to know what.