Stone, Allucquère Rosanne

1957–

Academic

Allucquère Rosanne “Sandy” Stone is a teacher, performer, and theorist in the area of cyberculture studies. She is founder and director of the Advanced Communication Technologies Laboratory (ACTLAB) at the University of Texas, Austin. In addition, Stone is a pioneer in the rapidly growing field of transgender studies.

Deemed a prodigy at a young age, Stone remembers being sent to private schools for a time, and then “returning to public schools ones when the money ran out.” Interspersed with a formal education were “years during which I [would show] up on the doorstep of this and that scholar whose work I admired and asking if I could audit classes.” During this time, Stone also began a lifelong interest in performance, creating and acting in 8mm films, composing music, and developing one of the first early multimedia experiments that would now be easily recognizable as raves.

Stone won a one-year scholarship to St. John's College in Annapolis, Maryland. To earn money, she worked in a dizzying array of jobs, all of which ultimately served to expand her knowledge of sound and light production. One year, for example, she worked in digital research at the Bell Telephone Laboratories Special Systems Exploratory Group. Another year, she studied retinal neurology at the Eye Research Foundation. Throughout, Stone assisted in film and music production companies as a cinematographer, sound engineer, or mixer.

After a brief time in New York, Stone moved to California to continue working in rock-n-roll sound engineering, collaborating with Jimi Hendrix, Jefferson Airplane, and others. It was during this time that Stone began transitioning as a transgendered woman.

With her transgendered status and her intimate knowledge of audio and visual technologies, Stone became a persuasive spokesperson for what feminist historian Donna Haraway has called the “cyborg ontology.” Cyborgs are bodies that are part organic [Page 423]and part mechanical (or chemically enhanced). They routinely traverse the boundaries between technological and natural, male and female, animal and human.

Stone has long been interested in how cyborgs function via what she terms “communications pros-theses.” As she related in Wired magazine, one of her most influential memories came as the result of an experiment she conducted with cats and FM transmitters. She implanted electrodes in a cat's inner ear, running them 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,” recalls Stone. Likewise, Stone considers the computer-generated voice of physicist Stephen Hawking to be a type of communication pros-thesis, writing that “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.”

Like Marshall McLuhan before her, Stone maintains that the social ramifications for communications prostheses extend far beyond the stories of “obvious” cyborgs like Hawking. Everyone in media culture has a relationship to communications prosthetics, Stone maintains, if only because communications technologies “interpenetrate us in ways we'd never anticipated and change us in ways we don't realize.”

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