Sandy Stone

Teaching the Unnameable Discourse:
An autobiographical lecture by Sandy Stone
European Graduate School. August 2000

Schirmacher: Sandy Stone is a white raven. She not only knows what she is talking about, she designed what she is talking about. She is the one you should ask if you want to know what kind of world we are going to live in, if you want to know what this fantasy called cyberspace is. Because she was already into it before anybody else, she had already organized international conferences on it before it became a daily subject. One of her main concerns which is also one of ours is, what happens to our bodily existence in a world which seems to just use our eyes and ears to let us live? What happens to all our other nice stuff? You know there's a lot of backlash against interest in cyberspace and hypermedia, 'oh, I don't want to do that, what about my personal life?' Sandy is the one who really understands these concerns, but also is in no way pessimistic she has the courage of entering the new world without giving up what is fun for us in the so-called old way of living. I'm very happy that she is here to share some insights with us.

Sandy Stone: Actually my involvement with technology started many, many years ago. I was probably two or three years old. My family had some friends on Long Island. We went out to visit our friend Mrs. Heisler, and while we were visiting a hurricane blew in, a huge hurricane with roaring winds, flashing lightning, and the powerlines blew down, and the streets filled with water, and the house got dark, and the big folks went into the kitchen and lit candles and sat around the kitchen table, and lit candles and whispered to each other, I don't know why they whispered, but they always did in circumstances like that. So all I could hear was the sibilance of their voices. I became thoroughly bored. I wandered away from the circle of light around the kitchen table and out into the other room which happened to be the living room. As soon as I got through the door it became very dark, I couldn't see the candlelight in the kitchen anymore. I couldn't hear their voices. All I could hear was the roaring of the wind. The sound of the rain beating on the windows. The room was huge and dark and filled with huge, dark furniture, some of it was covered with sheets, and the room smelled of a mixture of must, dust and old fabric which my daughter would later tell me was the smell of old people. I wandered around in the dark trying to see what there was to see and quite suddenly there was a tremendous burst of blue-white lightning, and I felt myself standing in front of an enormous radio, one of the first radios made for use at home. A console radio that stood about five feet high, it looked like it was a mile high to me. I looked up at it, and in that moment of lightning the two dials became two eyes, and the tuning area below became a mouth, and suddenly this object was possessed with an evil malevolent intelligence. It crouched to spring on me. I stood in front of it with all the hair on my body standing straight up, I couldn't move, I couldn't back away, I couldn't utter a sound, and in that split second there was a tremendous bellow of thunder, and that sounded realized me. Instantly I was freed, I turned and ran screaming back into the kitchen, where my family welcomed me with open arms and soothed me until I calmed down. And so here we are. It's many years later, and now I talk about technology in all its variants, forms, and kinds, and yet my first involvement with technology started before I had any idea what my lifework would be, before I had any idea really of what technology was. It started when I was two years old, in the middle of a storm, in a house in a hurricane, in that blue-white instant when the technology came alive for the first time. Now we have other diversions. Once a year there's an event in the virtual communities groups called Brigadoon day, which is the day on which the old virtual communities rise again from the mists of time, and the people who were members in the old days log back in for one day of memories, before, at sunset, those worlds sink once again into the mists, to remain hidden for another year. Brigadoon day is a way of remembering something about our history and how we came to be the people we are now, those mixtures of biology and technology, people who live partially in an imaginary world, a virtual world that in some senses doesn't exist at all, and in other senses represents an alternative universe as rich, as deep and as complex as the one we now inhabit. It's different, completely different, and yet some of it is the same. This is the time I refer to as post-modemism. We're actually not quite there yet, we still use modems but we're moving quickly toward a time when modems will go away. The post-modem time when we are all interconnected all the time, at full-speed, full-bandwidth, to other times, other worlds and other things that we are just beginning to understand. Consequently, I've become interested in how we articulate ourselves, our identities, consciousness, subjectivity and presence into these new worlds. Of course we don't even have common definitions of what these things mean. One of the things we note about this age we live in is the spread of what we call the internet, this great interconnected web of electronic communication, which is increasingly bringing us into contact with each other, with entities, corporations and devices far away, in a time when distance is beginning to have a different meaning, and time itself is beginning to change. How do we deal with things like that? How do we learn to live, to dance our lives when everything is everywhen and everything is anyone, and what about those of us who don't, and who never will, have no desire to? Are we all going to get along? I became interested in those things a number of years ago, first as I said in that flash of lightning. Later on I became involved in other, stranger aspects of technology. One of them was in my first career in technology, when I learned to, how to make, well, how is this going to sound? I might have learned to be a chemist, or a physicist or a critic, but no, my first excursion into learning about communication and identity was when I learned how to make headphones for, mynah birds. A mynah bird is a large black bird with a yellow beak, it looks like a crow and it can talk. I was working at the time for an organization called the Menniger organization which is a psychological therapy organization and hospital that was located in Topeka, Kansas in the great wastelands in the middle of the U.S.A. Topeka, which we affectionately called To-puke-a. Here I was at the Menniger foundation, hired to do great research, ok, what shall we do? We got a grant, from the National Institutes of Health, to study stuttering in humans. Of course you can't experiment on humans, and we were interested in accelerating the speed of our studies, so we decided to experiment on an animal that displayed some of the characteristics that humans display. First of all we had to have an animal that talked. This limited our field somewhat. Having decided mynah birds were the way to go, we put out a call and within a week we had a colony of approximately fifty mynah birds. Now, there are various theories about how stuttering works, there are those who believe that it's something about lesions in the brain, miswiring, things that can't be corrected, things that can be corrected. We were going on one of the minor theories which claims that stuttering comes from delayed auditory feedback, which is to say there is something wrong with the mechanism of hearing such that you hear yourself a fraction of a second later than what actually comes out of your mouth, if any of you have taken delayed auditory feedback tests, you know that this does in fact produce quite a reaction. We decided to teach our mynah birds to stutter using this delayed feedback. It became my job to make these little WWI fighter pilot helmets that these birds wore, we tied them under their chins and they hold the headphones onto their ears. Then we put microphones into the cages, delayed the auditory feedback by a tenth of a second and fed it through the headphones.Sure enough, within a very short time we had an entire room of mynah birds that said things like H…H…Hello! All we had to do was train them to stop. We couldn't train them to stop, we tried very hard, then the grant ran out, and there we were with a room full of fifty mynah birds going H…H…Hello! What do you do? You can't sell them. Nobody wants a stuttering mynah bird. All the rest of the money ran out, we had to go home, that was the end of the experiment. Having given up on the first part of my research career I decided to move on, I went to the belly of the beast, the National Institutes of Health itself in Bethesda, Maryland, where life was fine all the time, and grants were easier to get. We decided to work on a completely different topic, but one that had resonances still along the same lines. We worked on a project which was designed to test the inheritance of certain qualities of eye-coloring and hearing ability. That's an odd combination, but there's a, there is a colony of people who live in the Ozark Mountains and who are called albino heterochromes. An albino heterochrome has no pigmentation in the skin whatsoever. A true albino has no pigmentation in the eyes, either, but in a heterochrome, one eye has pigmentation, so the eyes are two different colors. The genes of the albino heterochrome can tell us a great deal about how certain neurological elements are transmitted, are inherited, because the area of the eye which is colored originates from the same part of the evolving embryo as does the inner ear, the nerves of the mechanism of hearing. By observing how heterochromism works, we could also make some estimates what was happening neurologically with regard to hearing, and we could check how this was being transmitted genetically from family to family, generation to generation. There are several problems with human subjects, one of them is that humans breed slowly, in fact the lifetime of the average human subject is the same as the lifespan of the average human experimenter. This means you have trouble checking from generation to generation. Secondly, true albinism in humans is accompanied frequently by a lack of sweat glands, so our best candidates in this project lived under the houses of their families where the temperature was fairly constant, and in summer they would come out just long enough to be wet down with water to keep them cool. They were very reluctant to leave that environment, and so it was difficult for us to do laboratory studies. Once again we decided to work on an analog animal with similar characteristics. After some debate we settled on cats. Once again we put out the call, and believe it or not very quickly we had a colony of fifty-five albino heterochrome cats. This is different, you don't interact with mynah birds much but you do interact with cats, and you tend to get friendly with your subjects, they climb all over you, and you all have a good time. As those of you who own cats are aware, it's very difficult to tell whether a cat is deaf or whether it's simply ignoring you. NIH knew this, so we had a credibility problem right from the beginning. We found a way to do behavioral audiometry, to teach cats to press pedals in response to audio tones, in a way that had never been done before. The secret is called Fiskafas. Fiskafas is a Finnish delicacy which consists of raw white fish ground up in heavy sweet cream. The cats would do handsprings for this stuff. You could get a cat to do anything for Fiskafas. It wasn't long before we had a whole colony of cats that would gladly press any pedal in the world. Within a few months we had excellent behavioral audiometry data. Our reviewers came and looked and said because there was no precedent for it we had to do an additional study, one that was done in some traditional way, we had to do electrical audiometry as well. Now it happens that with a cat you can do electrical audiometry, while although it's not uninvasive, it's very low in trauma. In the cat, the bula, which is the hollow sphere that surrounds the inner ear, is very thin. If you anesthetize the cat very lightly you can make a pinprick through the skin and into the bula, run a little wire with a ball at the end of it so that it doesn't traumatize the nerves. You run it in until it rests against the nerve bundle that comes out of the inner ear, then you seal all this up and bring the wire out to a plug on the cat's collar. The cat wakes up and runs off, and when you want to take measurements you plug into the collar, and then the cat is not only pressing pedals and hearing tones, you're also recording the information coming off the nerves of the inner ear. We did these experiments over a few weeks, we kept the electrodes in, which is called a chronic implant. It didn't seem to faze the cats any. I preferred to work at night, all geeks like to work at night. I would come in the evening after my fellow experimenters had gone home, when it was fairly dark and quiet and there wasn't much sound other than the whisper of the air conditioners. I would bring out one of the cats and plug them in and take measurements. I was working with one of my favorite cats, Lucy. She and I were doing this experiment together, I was watching the response of her nerves on an oscilloscope. I was watching these squiggles while I was presenting different sounds, clicks and tones, to Lucy. While I was doing this the oscilloscope stopped registering anything. I realized that the wire had slipped in Lucy's bula and was no longer resting against the nerve. I took the wire, moved it a little bit, and sometimes in a circumstance like that, when you're doing research on individual nerves you can tell better where you're placed if you listen to what the nerve is doing because they make very characteristic clicking sounds, so I put on a pair of headphones and plugged into the oscilloscope. While I was moving the wire around, Lucy shook her head and the wire moved unpredictably. I suddenly found myself hearing through Lucy's ear. I could hear my own breathing, very loud. I touched my cheek and it sounded like a rasping sound. I could hear the rustle of my clothing, I could hear the air conditioner roaring behind me. I put an electrode in her other ear and then over the next few days I built a postage-stamp sized FM transmitter which I attached to her collar. One night when everyone else had gone home I came in, I attached to the electrodes to the transmitter, attached it to her collar, turned it on, we had at the time a door which lead to a field of tall grass, I opened the door and put Lucy out in the field, turned on my receiver and put the headphones on. Lucy was still standing by the door. I was now hearing the world from the perspective of about six inches off the ground. The movement of the grass sounded like bamboo banging together. I could hear insects walking around, they sounded like they were wearing hobnail boots. And off in the grass at a great distance I could hear something that was not an insect moving around. Lucy heard it too. We turned our head to face it, and then very slowly we began to move towards whatever it was, moving through the grass, towards this creature. It took about fifteen minutes. I could hear the grass brushing past my ears, I could hear the insects go by on either side of me. Eventually when we got about a foot from what was obviously now a mouse foraging in the grass, we stopped. Lucy crouched, we crouched down. I could hear the liquid crackle of our muscles bunching together as we gathered ourselves for the spring. Then we sprang! The creature shrieked, I ripped off the headphones. I stood there, trying to separate myself from what had just happened. I as cat in the grass, stalking this creature, finding it, catching it, eating it, and I as Sandy Stone, the researcher in the laboratory taking data on an experiment, and after I had gotten my breath back to normal I was thinking about what to do now, I had an experimental animal loose in the field. As I was beginning to realize what I had just done, there was a scratching at the door. I opened it and there was Lucy, who immediately presented me with two kidneys and a tail. It was a good time, what a day. It raised issues, of how identity works, and how communication prosthetics can mediate one's sense of oneself and of one's place and actions. It was with that in mind that I later came to the field of virtual communities and of cyberspace. So when I fell accidentally as I did into the university I had a certain background on which to call when I began to research virtual communities. First of all, one of the issues that came up for me with regard to studying virtual communities in the university were other experiences. I had also experienced another example of narrow bandwidth communication, in the case of phone sex. I had, early in my career as a budding anthropologist, been introduced to a community of phone sex workers in the San Francisco Bay area who immediately pointed out to me that what they did was very much like my work with virtual communities. The phone sex workers depended on a very limited set of cultural codes which allowed them to compress information into a very small size and send them like linguistic tokens over a telephone line to the other end where the client was able to decompress them by virtue of shared cultural expectations. It was like pouring boiling water onto this little linguistic token, and thereby reconstruct a very detailed image, not only actions but also of bodies. So notice that we're not only sending voice, we're also sending bodies through the wires, which means that cultural expectations work the same at both ends, it means that an experience described at one end has a resonance at the other, even if it's not precisely the same resonance. Consequently, after I'd observed them for a while, they said why don't you do this for a while and find out for yourself? So I did phone sex for a while, and found out that yes indeed, this is another aspect of virtual community, another aspect of what makes these things go. In fact, the narrowing of the bandwidth, when used properly, intensifies the experience, it intensified for some reasons that we know and some that we don't. Marshall McLuhan called it Hot media and Cool media. Hot media are media with great definition, with a lot of bandwidth, in other words, and Cool media have low bandwidth. When one is operating in a cool medium it's necessary to engage one's own imagination in order to resupply the missing information, the information removed by the narrowing of the bandwidth and it's this engagement with one's own imagination that produces the sense of connection with whatever it is that's going on in that medium. So narrow bandwidth media tend to work in our favor when we're dealing with virtual communities when things need to be described. It's not the complexity of the description that makes virtual communities work, but what's left out, because this is what needs to re-entered by the participants, thereby performing the work on the part of the participants, thereby engaging not only the imagination but the sense of work and participation that makes creating things in virtual communities go. So I built the ActLab. As I said I got into academia by accident, I was studying at UCSC with Donna Haraway when we concocted the idea of my going to San Diego in order to study in a more conventional science studies program than what Donna and I were doing at the time. I called and I said 'I'd like to come down and be an exchange student for a year.' The person at the other end said 'What department are you in?' I was in History of Consciousness, which is something that you don't mention outside of it because no one knows what the hell it is, so I said 'What department are you in?' 'Sociology.' so I said 'that's funny, I'm in sociology too.' I went to San Diego and I spent a year in the sociology department until I had an interesting encounter with one of the professors there. I had been asked by some of the women in the program if I would write up a syllabus that would raise some of the issues that were not being raised in a traditional science program, certain issues regarding feminist theory in relation to science, and perhaps just a tad of post-structuralism for flavor. I used a phrase in the prospectus, 'We will hold these discourses in productive tension, without allowing them to collapse into univocal accounts.' This is not even post-structuralism, it's just reasonable. So it was that one afternoon three days later I found myself in the office of this particular professor having been summoned there on very short notice for a meeting whose purpose I did not understand. I sat down on the other side of the table. He looked at me. I saw he had the syllabus in front of him. He quoted from it without even looking at it, he looked directly at me and said 'We will hold these discourses in productive tension without allowing them to collapse into univocal accounts!' and he paused, and then he hit the table with his fist, Wham! He said, 'Morally bankrupt!' 'Santa Cruz babble!' There was a large inkwell with a quill pen, and it leaped into the air and the pen came down on the desk with a huge splotch of ink. He said, 'I'm taking your grant away, we're sending you home, we don't want any of this stuff here, we do real science!' Do you know the Maxwell tape ad, with the guy in the chair? That was me. Thus my career in sociology was mercifully brief. Shortly thereafter while I was packing my things, the chair of the department came running in and said 'I know you've just had a bit of a difficult time, how would you feel about being an instructor?' Oh. Ok, so I went from being a graduate student to being an instructor rather abruptly, and I went around for three years teaching everything under the sun, all topics in all departments and I would be there, with no tenure, being a perpetual temp, if hadn't been for the clarion call from the University of Texas at Austin. They wanted to start a new media program, and to their credit they had no idea what new media was. They wanted to bring in someone with some idea to start up a laboratory. I went out there and proceeded to start what is now known as the ActLab, the Advanced Communications Technologies Laboratory. For those of you who intend to go on and start new media programs, here is the way we did it. Since nobody knows what new media is, let's not try to define it. In fact, let's prevent it from being defined, because as soon as you utter the word, you have crystallized it and stopped it from growing. One of things I did was to start a continual rolling debate about what new media was, or what it wasn't, rather, because it's difficult to talk about what it is. That seminar, called Theories and Methods of an Unnameable Discourse is still going on along with the rest of the program except that now my primary job is to keep the administration from knowing precisely what's going in there, to present a series of plausible narratives about what we're doing. This in fact works very well, we now have several layers of deception, and now that the administration is more or less aware of this they've become very happy with the whole arrangement, it's clearly successful and now we have to move on to our next problem, which is, will success spoil the ActLab? When you go out and start your program you will find that just about the worst moment is when they start giving you money and equipment, because then they start having expectations. Then you are in deep trouble. I'm trying to find ways that deflect this. One of the arrangements that I teach for the university of the future is how we re-articulate a traditional university structure in these terms. One of things you need to do is to think of the university in terms of a pool of multiply talented people, with a periphery of specialists who remain fixed in place while in the middle your generalists are continually reconfiguring themselves to look like whatever funding is available, they're after. This is the drive-by theory, drive-by funding principle of the university, which actually in practice works fairly well. The trick is to get enough generalists in place, but also to get them to admit that they may work across-fields, we talked about Derrida this afternoon, as well as other academics of notes, as having moved from one field to another. One of my mentors, Jim Clifford, started out as an anthropologist but moved to history because certain things he was doing were not permissible in anthropology. But, and this is a big but, one of things about new media is that new media is not a combination of existing disciplines. Interdisciplinary is not new media. Multidisciplinarity is not new media. In the search for a descriptive language and a set of theories and methods that adequately describe what is going on with this slippery thing we call new media, we find that a better way to describe what's happening is that we create resonances between certain nodes within existing disciplines. But creating a resonance, which is the only word I can think of to explain it, is not the same as teaching a little of this and a little of that. Here is the problem of trying to articulate what it is that we're doing have, and why it is that I in my work have chosen performance. This is something I've only been doing recently. I don't work with slides, videotapes or sound, and the reason for that is in a perverse way I want to call attention again to a sort of new essentialism in which the only thing that mediates our interaction is the surface of my body and the tone of my voice. In this sense, I want to call attention again to certain older modes of communication which perversely go on working and possess the power that they always have had, and which in a certain deep sense are completely unaffected by the wonderful, powerful technologies that we now bring to bear upon communication upon the educational enterprise. Because perversely, it's my theory that no amount of technology replaces a professor on one end and a student on the other, and a dialogue directly between them that involves not simply images and sound but motion, delicate body placement, proximities, the finest possible nuances, even perhaps smell for all we know, but that that advanced, extreme bandwidth works as the opposite of the extremely limited bandwidth in which imagination is engaged. It works on both ends of the spectrum, both the limited and wide bandwidth. It's what in-between that gets us into trouble, but it's what's in-between that's providing a lot of the interest within the university today, because of the ways in which is cost-effective. The big buzzword right now is distance learning, which has a place but doesn't replace any of this sort of interaction, thank heavens, because if it weren't for the face to face, if it weren't for the sociality which is created by this sort of wide bandwidth interaction, what it means to be human might change, float away from a grounding signifier, in such a way that we might have some problems getting a hold of it. Not that it won't anyway, particularly once young gene hackers get a hold of the tools for mutating us as creatures, we're going to start to change very quickly behind all recognition. Let me mention parenthetically that remember first of all that you're inside my irony distortion field, but with regard to what I'm saying about genetics, what's keeping us from playing with life on our desktops right now maybe nothing more than the fact that base pairs, the basic element of genetic construction, cost a dollar a piece right now. The simplest possible organism that you can play with has roughly a million base pairs. So it's a little out of range for your average hacker, but base pairs are getting cheaper, what happens when we get down to a tenth of a cent, a hundredth of a cent for a base pair, and you can start to make life on your desktop? We think we have trouble with viruses now, which are just pure information. We have surprises coming. Anyway, back to new media. One of the things that we do is this thing we do called the PGP, Public Genitals Project. This is a way of de-centering and moving to remote parts of the body and trying to play with the idea of distance and body parts. It's an ongoing project that involves a pair of flat computer screens that you wear over your genital area. The idea was originated because we discovered quite accidentally that it's not illegal to be naked in Austin. Someone goes out wearing nothing but these screens, they have a battery pack and a receiver attached to an antenna, and from the ActLab we broadcast images of genitals that people have sent to us over the internet from all over the world. Ok, why do we bother? We're bothering because this is just another of way of saying bodies, images of bodies here in this space and in another space, distance, closeness, let's play with all those terms. There a number of artists who do this in different ways, such as Stelarc. Stelarc is a performance artist who attaches electrodes to his muscles and connects those electrodes to voltage power supplies which are run by computer. At remote places throughout the internet people can put on small prosthetic devices, move their arms and legs and send information to Stelarc's computer which then send that information to the electrodes on his muscles, so that you can manipulate his body remotely. Of course what's being played with here is, where is the agency? Who is in control of his body? What does that say about the boundaries of his identity? What does it say about the boundaries of agency when the person who is moving you is somewhere else across the world and your only connection is a string of data over the internet? Those are the kinds of issues that we're interested in. Those are merely exemplars of some extreme ways in which we play in the interest of learning with these concepts. We're also interested in computers as arenas of experience rather than as tools for data and computation. In the use of the computer in the new paradigm, as an arena for experience, we have the possibility of a new kind of community, one which, as all of cyberspace, is an effect, rather than a cause, caused initially by the disappearance of true public spaces. There's very little left of true public space in the United States. There's a lot of things that are simulacra of public space, particularly the shopping mall. If you think for one minute that those are public spaces, try going there taking out your juggling clubs, you'll find out very quickly that those are private spaces. With the disappearance of public spaces, of space of free interaction, comes an increase in space within the electronic metaphor. As we move through time, from houses that were one multipurpose earth floor to homes with separated room with specifically designated identities and purposes, as we moved from benches to chairs, from villages with common purpose to individuals, the rise of psychoanalysis, the invention of the novel, of mirrors, of the diary and the interior monologue, as we went from the collective to the individual, and as we went from the individual to the sovereign subject, with the increasing isolation that that implies, we eventually arrive at the crown of creation, one person alone in a small compartment with a computer, the height of industrial development. From there, with those progresses in mind, it's simply one more move, metaphorical and technological, to break through the screen to the world inside and to see it not as something which diminishes but as something which adds to, complexifies and in some sense completes, as a way of saving us from the products of our own overcorporatization. It's that aspect of the virtual world that interests me and the students who seek me out. The last thing is that I'm a net-partner baby. I met my partner on the internet, and at the time this was not ok. It was very very rare, we were among the first, and when we met on the internet we knew that the odds of anything coming out of it beyond just an internet friendship were astronomically small. But we had to find out. So, after meeting online through a rather odd set of circumstances, we were both interested in virtual communities, we had a little exchange, we were both in our personas, and so we built a MOO for two. A MOO is the software for a virtual community. We made a little one which consisted of four rooms, including a bedroom and a kitchen. We lived there metaphorically for several weeks. Life was very sweet in the MOO, we went to sleep, got up in the morning and went into the kitchen to make breakfast, Simby went to his workroom and I went to mine, every once and a while I would tiptoe into his room to see what he's doing, I'd kiss him on the top of his head and leave, he'd tiptoe in and see what I was doing…It was an idyllic, sweet existence, and all of this was being constructed textually as we go. We were building the environment, constructing the life in text form. It worked so well that we finally decided, do we dare meet? shall we just keep it online, shall we keep our personas forever? And so we met, it was very scary. Oddly enough, we survived, and we're here to tell about it. We're here to explain that the online mode can work, and it works in many different ways. It works as personas online, that's good, it works as taking it offline and being willing to take the risk of the face-to-face, the complexification that beyond which online interaction cannot go. It's these multiple modes, the online the offline, the experience in the meat and the imagine body, that make this post-modem world what it is. I wish that I had the time to go into detail about the other aspects that have to do with the playing of gender, desire and technology. I would like to leave you with my solution to one particular problem, which is, how do we describe the nature of interaction in a mediated world which crosses back and forth between these boundaries? What do we use to describe how we relate to each other, as theoreticians and as real social beings in a world in which mediation plays a real continuing part? How do we theorize this? I propose a term, and the term is Enlacement. It's a French word which not only means to entwine but it also has that other sense, that breath of the body, that sense of touch, of contact, of enlacing one's arms, and thereby the resonance of desire and sensuality which we must never lose touch with, never lose sight of, even in the mediated life towards which we now move. As we go further into the world of post-modemism, into the collapse of the boundaries between musculature and hydraulics, electronics and neurology, between biology and technology, which is our state of being at the close of the mechanical age, and the beginning of a new age for which as yet we have no name, let's remember as we go forward into that, Enlacement, the sense of touching, of reaching out. No matter how far we go, remember that we live in our bodies, and not in the wires. So, from a blue-white instant in the dark and the terrifying object when I was two years old, to today surrounded by objects that are both frightening and filled with promise, I come through time to bring you this very very short story. Thank you.