"Perception requires engagement": Banner from the Venice Biennale. You bet.

Patience, please

We put our first dialup server online before the Internet or the Web existed. As new ideas came along and the possibilities expanded, we wrote the code for them and hung it somewhere in the existing system where it would do the most good. Eventually, mainstream technology got in gear, and there appeared lots of nice, pre-packaged software that could be installed easily and that mostly Just Worked (TM). By that time, though, we had so much specialized code in the system that it wasn't possible to extricate it cleanly. Consequently, and after much soul-searching and hesitation and testing possible migration paths, we're in the process of a full shock-and-awe upgrade -- hardware, software, the works -- at the end of which, with luck, everything will work for everybody. Believe me, though, it isn't easy, and during the upgrade period some stuff will be broken... like Cynbe's and my blog, for instance. All I can say is that we apologize for any inconvenience, but we're convinced that the end product will be worth it.

Ktahmet/Remember

You may have heard vague tales of Ktahmet/Remember, my very first novel, written way back in the XXth Century, before The Present existed. Finally, after years of waffling, I'm putting it online, a chapter at a time -- but, because I'm slightly demented, I'm putting the chapters online in no particular order. There's actually a method to it, and you'll find a much more complete explanation here.

Bloomington: Post-Posttranssexual: Transgender Studies and Feminism

This event was the ride of my life -- celebrating, as it did, the twentieth anniversary of the publication of The Empire Strikes Back: a Posttranssexual Manifesto, which some academic folks claim is s founding document for the field of Transgender Studies. Susan Stryker and the University of Indiana at Bloomington set out to prove it by holding a conference dedicated to honoring that work and the work of all scholars who put their asses on the line, figuratively and literally, to create this new and still controversial discipline. They were kind enough to invite me and Kate Bornstein as guests of honor, and, believe me, an honor it was.

But besides the wonderful conference, we were treated to a special tour of the amazing Kinsey Institute, and Kate was invited to sign their archive copy of her book Gender Outlaw (in the pic to the right). The Kinsey Institute is jaw-droppingly amazing...their archives include the world's most extensive collection of erotic art, dating back to the sixteenth century. Here's a shot of six of us in the Kinsey office: Kate, Hans Scheirl, me, and I'm still trying to sort out everyone else: help me out, folks, drop me a line with names.

Not to make light of any of this...fact is, during the panel discussion Susan asked me to read the concluding paragraph of the Posttranssexual Manifesto to the audience. I got a few sentences in, and discovered I was crying. It's been a long road. We're not near the end yet, but we're all clearly on our way. And that, as Gandalf says, is a reassuring thought.

Madrid: Technologies of the Body

The Fourth International Workshop on Technologies of the Body will roll into Madrid from December 17 through the 23rd. Directed by Jaime del Val, the week-long series of intense workshops and performances features Stelarc, Daniel Schorno, Donald Glowinski, Rudolfo Quintas and Andre goncalves, Roberta Bosco, Laura Canete, Juan Carlos Olmos, and of course Yours Sincerely, doing something unsettling concerning "dissonances of gender". This year's theme is Frontier Bodies: Aesthetics and Politics in Post-postmodernism. This, Bilbo said, taking the pipe from his mouth and smiling up at Gandalf, will be a night to remember. There are still a few registration slots available, so hurry over here and sign up now.

Neovagina Monologues at the Vortex

We mounted The Neovagina Monologues, a brand-new version, at the Vortex Theatre right here in Austin from November 29 to December 2. This performance, produced with the wonderful help of Producing Artistic Director Bonnie Collum, was from my perspective the definitive show, and the packed house seemed to agree. The original was in three parts, Gender of Choice, Sexual Hoo Hah, and Languages of Women. each seventy-eight minutes long and meant to run on three successive nights. For the Vortex show, we edited and combined all three parts into one much tighter evening, consisting of two one-hour parts and a fifteen-minute intermission.

The show was inspired by Eve Ensler's The Vagina Monologues, which started life as a one-person performance from a finished script; and by the late Spalding Gray, who sat at a table and improvised full-evening performances out of his notebook. There's more information about the Vortex here, and more info about the performance in general here.

I was thrilled when the Vortex's own Chad Salvata agreed to write and produce an original musical score and sound design for this production. With Jessica Cohen's inspired lighting design and terrific support from stage manager Tamara Farley and lightboard operator James Plata, I was in the best of hands.

Since the show was right here in Austin, we had the luxury of weeks of preparation and nearly a week of rehearsal, during which we tweaked the script extensively. The result of all that effort on everyone's part was right up there on the stage. Plus, we were finally able to get good four-camera video coverage (plus over a thousand high-quality stills) on three of the four nights, so there will definitely be a DVD down the line...at least, after as long as it takes to review and edit thirty-eight hours of footage into a single two-hour performance video.

What's Up

It's an interesting new world we live in, and all too frequently not everyone appreciates the changes, or understands how to move gracefully with them. This is particularly true of monster cartels like the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA).

Some time ago, there was a flap concerning encryption systems the MPAA uses to cripple DVDs and HD DVDs in order to prevent the purchaser (you) from exercising certain rights. These include such heinous crimes as fair use, backup copies, copying a DVD to the hard drive of a home entertainment system, and so forth.

Big cartels tend to be slow learners, because, in their experience, what they can't buy with money they can coerce with thuggery. One of the many things big cartels refuse to understand is that Digital Rights Management, or DRM, is a zero-sum game. So it wasn't long before clever people figured out the key to the encryption code, which is a single number, and posted it on their blogs. Amazingly, the MPAA then asserted that they owned the number, that posting it violated copyright, and that the MPAA would sue anyone who printed it. (For history buffs, that number, in hexadecimal format, is 09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688C0.)

Copyrighting a single number is analogous to copyrighting a single letter of the alphabet. The idea that copyright law - already in serious disarray - could be further twisted by an abusive cartel laying claim to a single number raised the ire of a good many citizens, with the result that within a short time the number appeared on hundreds of thousands of web sites all over the world. At first the MPAA tried to kill each site by trolling for the number and demanding that it be removed. Angry citizens responded by embedding the number in images - like the cute li'l gebril above - making it invisible to text searches. Shortly the number was everywhere -- on T-shirts, in poetry and song lyrics, bumper stickers, graffiti, even tattoos. To me, this merely demonstrates the will of the people in action against thuggish attacks from a huge and clumsy beast which has outlived its time and can't understand the world it now, perforce, inhabits.

And this, of course, is where the ACTLab comes in. A flap of this nature, pitting commercial behemoths wedded to obsolete business models against light, lithe, distributed, and densely connected networks of citizens with a deep sense of fairness and scant tolerance for greed, is ripe for theorizin'. Baudrillard, had he lived a bit longer, would have loved it as much as I do.

The MPAA, chastened but not deterred, has since shut up about suing people, and instead has returned to attempting to create the perfect unbreakable encryption scheme. Since this is impossible in any real-world scenario, I - and everyone else - await the next move. Whereupon the MPAA will again experience the power of a million angry DVD fans.

Orion's Belt, curated by Marjorie Vecchio and the Gallerinas, was a month-long multimedia exhibition at Sheppard Gallery, at the University of Nevada at Reno, "converging on the intersections of health, technology, and mythology". They concluded the week with a keynote theoryperformance by Your Humble Whatever.

Sponsored by Nevada Humanities and the University of Nevada, the exhibition featured work by artists such as Deborah Aschheim and Lisa Mezzacappa, whose work absolutely floored me. The catalog says that "Phonological is an attempt to "back up" Deborah Aschheim's twenty-five favorite words by storing them in songs so that she will remember them in the event of possible future neurological damage or aphasia. In order to hopefully preserve it, Aschheim has to surrender her vocabulary to other people to interpret..." The pieces, which to my eye resemble clusters of neurons, glow eerily, and do, in fact, emit songs. The photo above shows a portion of the gallery area to which the staff added chairs and a table for my work, which, in this case, I did sitting down. The gallery videoed the work in HD, and if things go well there may be a DVD later; we'll see.

ACTLab, ACTLab Student Media Services, and ACTLab TV completed this summer's ACTLab.TV Summer of Code. In a groundbreaking step, this year we intended to add a wrinkle of our own by mixing in some social scientists, who would look for patterns in the interactions between working Open Source coders to see if something interesting emerges. If you wanna code with us, or be a participant observer or just hang out and schmooze, the time to volunteer for the next round is May.

The 2007 ACTLabTV Film Festival was a terrific success. For 2008 the Festival is particularly interested in films/videos made with cellphones and cheap digital cameras in movie mode. So many people say "I could make an incredible movie if only I could get my hands on one o' them HD cameras". We think not. As Alan Fox-Strangways said in a famous letter to Harry Partch, "Regardless of theory, music is whatever someone can think out of an old battered horn." Whatever, the ACTLabTV Film Festival will continue to push the boundaries of being brilliant with cheap tech.

On March 31 The Neovagina Monologues was the concluding event at "Creative Forces: Women, Art, Science", the 2007 Mid-Atlantic Womens Studies Association national conference, held this year at Bucks County College, near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. I'll be performing Part One, "Gender of Choice", running time 78 minutes. Bucks intended to video the performance with a three-camera shoot, which would have helped greatly with improving the piece when we viewed the edited version as part of preparations for the November Austin show. Unfortunately the taping failed, due largely to inexperience on the part of the tech staff, so we didn't get to do that; the perfect documentation of the piece in its current state still awaits the proper confluence of opportunity and preparation. Note: This was a PERFORMANCE. There was NO THEORY.

Thanks to my old colleague Chris Gray, my visit was part of the Crown College Fortieth Anniversary Celebration. In this pic I'm on the Porter College back campus not far from Crown, perched on a popular sculpture that was fondly known as the Flying IUD. It was a shocker to discover that here in the 21st Century nobody knew what an IUD was. Tempus fugit, Y'all...

I was in residence at EGS, the amazing bleeding-edge university of the future in Saas-Fee, Switzerland, from June 1 to June 22. Usually Cynbe and I do this together, and we love talking theory with all and sundry, though each of us interprets the term "theory" somewhat differently. We're based at the Allalin Hotel, the EGS residence headquarters. Cynbe has been discussing a new programming language, about which more will shortly be revealed. This year I taught a course entitled Nanophilosophy: Invisible Revolution, which (from the catalog) "foregrounds the developing nature of submicroscopic signaling and its troubled relationship with informatics of domination and control far beyond the Orwellian imaginary." Other EGS faculty include David Lynch, Peter Greenaway, the Quay Brothers, Donna Haraway, Avital Ronell, Bruce Sterling, John Waters, Slavoj Zizek, Shelly Jackson, Victor Burgin, Judith Butler, and Paul Miller/DJ Spooky. Former faculty and still guiding spirits include Jean-Francis Lyotard, Jacques Derrida, and Jean Baudrillard. Forget Foucault, Y'all.

The 52nd international Biennale de Venezia June 14 (with a bunch of EGS folx) and again June 23-24 (solo), ogling art, hanging with friends, and getting ideas. If you didn't spot me ambling about or at a table near the turtle fountain, you should've looked for me around the Swiss pavilion. Perhaps we hoisted a glass of white and discussed, ahem, theory. See you in two years...

Handmaiden of the Antichrist

Not long ago a group from a well-known university in the Dallas vicinity toured the campus here. As they passed our corner of the academic vineyard, one of them asked what building it was. When the docent told him, he gasped, "Isn't that where Sandy Stone works? She teaches young children to change their sex. She is a handmaiden of the Antichrist!"

Jeez, guys. Flattered though I may be to be perceived as a world-class menace, I'm afraid the reality is far less flamboyant. While Sex Change 101 is an interesting idea, it doesn't exist -- there's a lot more basic work to be done simply by educating people about the social and cultural nature of gender and sexuality, and that work is already being done by people far more qualified than I. UT has an admirable program in Women's and Gender Studies (of which I'm a member), as well as a flourishing research group devoted to LBGT issues (whose meetings I hardly ever get to attend). Plus, there are several student support groups, whose value to the community is accentuated by occasional attempts to stamp them out. Nothing says success better than being attacked.

However, for those of you who may want to join in, we are making a limited number of Handmaiden of the Antichrist T-shirts available from CafePress. With each shirt you get a genuine Certificate of Authenticity, signed by Sandy Stone herself, and all the proceeds go to help one of the student support groups. Who needs to be attacked by lesbian separatists while you're simply trying to make women's music when you can be a Handmaiden in the comfort of your own home? Don't envy the handmaidens; be one!

Ceci n'est pas un blog

I get a lot of email from people who say something like "Why can't I post a response to your blog?"

Well, the simple answer is: This is not a blog.

A blog is a fairly well-defined piece of software, cleanly written, incorporating simple means for creating content, syndication, and a mechanism for managing comments. It's clearly social software, as we currently understand the term, and a conduit for everything from the pithiness of Chomsky to the lone ranter shouting into the dark. (Don't discount shouting into the dark; it keeps the wolves away.)

On the other hand, this website is a steaming hunk of bricolage, originally written in HTML, to which I later added (ghasp!) tables, then (doubleghasp!) frames, then a CSS skeleton I got from Gila years ago, with more hunks of html and xml and javascript stuck on as occasion required. You can see the content change; less obviously, the underlying code also changes, as befits the website of someone teaching a course called Extreme Freestyle Hacking. But blogging? I never intended to add any code to enable people to post comments.

I could fake it with a line at the bottom that says "Comments for this post are closed", and don't think I haven't entertained the idea. But on the other hand, you don't need me to tell you that the boundaries between this website and a blog are getting mighty porous. It started as an experiment, in the very early days of the web, when I had a few minutes left over from keeping the ACTLab site stable in spite of our enthusiastic students' trampling the bounds of reason and good code. These days it clearly has a life of its own. But it's just my website. It's not a blog.

Uh-huh.

Science Fiction

Yes, I did actually write all of my early stuff on a lovely old Olivetti. And after the Olivetti, for a time there was an IBM Selectric. It wasn't until the second draft of Ktahmet/Memory that I got my hungry li'l hands on a borrowed Kaypro "portable" computer. It looked like a sewing machine and weighed about twenty pounds, but it was a stable beast, and with the help of Mark of the Unicorn's Final Word I finally entered the XXth Century.

None of those typescripts survived the last few moves, but the magazines in which they were originally published did. So recently I've been scanning some of the early stuff right out of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and Galaxy and so forth, and putting them into digital form. Though it still needs a bit of cleaning, the first one, Thank God You're Alive, is on my Projects page. This is the sort of stuff one turns out at a tender age, so be gentle, gentle reader.

By the way, that image to the right is the only time I made Galaxy's cover. The illustration, by Gaughan, is for Farewell To The Artifacts, which I wrote on the venerable Olivetti and which I haven't finished scanning. The title in the box was supposed to be "Farewell To The Artifacts", too, but at the last minute they bought Robert Silverberg's "Dying Inside" -- so his title wound up gracing the illustration for my story. That's the writing game, folks.:)

Hello

Professor? Me? Hmmm... I can still remember standing on a streetcorner in, um, Madrid I think it was, with Brenda Laurel and Rob Tow and maybe Atau Tanaka, when we realized that we were all fully employed at the same time -- which had never happened before. Felt weird. I was a theoretician; they all had real jobs. Anyway, enough woolgathering. Welcome to my new web pages. That's me on the left. Well, sorta. Actually that's more like me up there at the top. After years of insisting that my students produce kickass web sites while I went on hand-coding absolute dirt-basic HTML for myself, I realized it was time to give in to XHTML and CSS. So the children of the cobbler may still not have Flash, but at least they aren't embarrassingly barefoot. Still, no matter how hard I try, unless I devote something like a year to this site it's inevitably gonna be ragged. A lot of links still don't work, and all I can say is oops. So please bear with the rough edges while I and my students are off devoting our energy to a far more noble pursuit: Designing a device which converts human stupidity into clean-burning fuel.

Deviant Bodies Gallery Exhibition

As it says up there, Deviant Bodies is a groundbreaking exhibition exploring the margins of gender and representation. We don't often see these at mainstream galleries, and the event is further remarkable in bringing together such a large group of talented artists who have all focused their efforts on this topic. The event, which is sponsored by a generous grant from the Andy Warhol Foundation, runs from September 29 through December 17 at the CEPA Gallery ( 617 Main Street, Buffalo, New York). Yours Sincerely was honored to have been asked to participate, and is represented in the exhibition by two installation works: Trapped and Simple Identity. That's a still from Simple Identity at the left. As usual with my stuff, Trapped didn't fit into any of the preexisting categories for submitted work, but the nice folks at CEPA were kind enough to find ways to accommodate it.

ACTLab TV

ACTLabTV is a cutting-edge Transmedia project developed entirely by actlab students. During the summer, through the good offices of the RTF New Media Initiative, the ACTLabTV folks participated in the Google Summer of Code, during which they were able to extend the project in some very interesting ways. The basic idea behind ACTLabTV is that with the right software you don't need broadband to broadcast video on the Web -- anyone with internet access, even a simple dialup connection, can be a videocasting station. In technical terms, the system is distributed, acephalous, and format-agnostic, which is to say that it's part of the rapidly growing family of online social architectures such as Flickr, Wikipedia, and YouTube, but different in that in the ACTLabTV architecture there is no central server, and consequently no single point of failure. I don't really have to pump Joseph Lopez and Brandon Wiley's accomplishments... they're changing the world just fine on their own. Just in case you haven't discovered the greatest advance in Web video technology since sliced challah, have a peek here.

Who is Sandy Stone, Anyway?

Associate Professor at the University of Texas at Austin, Senior Artist at the Banff Centre, Professor of New Media and Performance at the European Graduate School EGS, Artist, Performer, Author, Critic, Public Intellectual, Transgender, Wife, Mother, Drive-By Theoretician.

Thinking of coming to UT to work with me?

Things to think about: Read my Teaching page first. Do you make stuff? Have a look at my current Projects (even though most of the links on that page are broken). To get a sense of who I am, kinda, read the FAQ. Also, it may be helpful to know that enrolling in the RTF department in order to work with me may not be the best idea; you might do better to take an interdisciplinary doctorate based in some other department and work with me from there, so first read Application Advice. To get a sense of how I teach and why my work is grounded in the semiotics of the design of the actlab studio, you might read Under The Radar.

RTF New Media Initiative

Five years in the making, the department of Radio-Television-Film New Media Initiative formalizes a central part of the ACTLab mission in a department-friendly package offering "a range of exciting courses, projects, and events for students interested in learning the latest developments in modes of communication and artistic expression." The statement on the "About Us" page reads: "We are a group of students and faculty from many areas and disciplines with a common goal: To create vital, vibrant, and innovative New Media courses and research which are flexible, open to change, and extend their horizons through rich interactions between our students and faculty and the greater New Media culture at institutions worldwide. Our goal is to produce star graduates with portfolios of radically new work and with the confidence to become leaders in this ever-changing field." Yes, indeed. To apply to the Initiative, email me, Joseph Lopez, or the Initiative. Don't apply via the RTF advisors. People who apply via the RTF advisors wind up futilely running through mazes with lots of dead ends. Use the direct approach. And to better understand our unconventional approach to New Media education, read Under The Radar.

...And The Beast Has Ten Thousand Names

New Media, eh? How about Digital Media, Digital Arts, Transmedia, MultiMedia, Convergent Media? Greetings, Hacker of the Old Code, she said, bowing gravely. All paths are One. And once again I remind you that in the ACTLab we've developed our own unique teaching and production methods for accomplishing the New Media (or your term of choice here: digital media, digital art, digital digital digital...) thing. Trust me, it's a good idea to read Under The Radar to grok what it is.

No foolin', the snowy landscape was actually shot in Austin, Texas...Live Snowbunny Capital of the World.

On Tour

Apologies, I haven't kept up with reporting on all the wonderful places New Media-fu happens because our efforts have been going into building an affiliated web site which will be released very soon.  There are only so many hours in a day. I did mount a new performance in March 2006, which I'm currently touring; the ACTLab Student Media Services Under The Radar Film Festival was terrific; and there's SXSW 2006 to recover from, so it's not as if nothing's happening...



...and while we're on the subject, how in hell does everybody else in the sidereal universe find the time to keep their webpages updated? Is there a secret vault full of time that everybody else knows about, and simply goes to and dips out as much as they need?...