The Metaverse U conference held
on February 16-17 at Stanford University explored the cultural, technological, legal, and economic issues surrounding virtual
worlds. A full video transcript of the conference will be made permanently available on the web, archived to become part of a global conversation on
virtual worlds. Sites for viewing and download will be announced both here and on the Metaverse U site as soon as they are available.
We cordially invite you to extend the conversation begun at the conference, and solicit your participation in the post-conference exchange of ideas on
the Metaverse U wiki. To all our speakers, to our esteemed colleagues and friends in attendance both at Stanford and in Second
Life, and to the many individuals who worked to ensure the success of this event, we offer our heartfelt thanks.
The Stanford Humanities Lab is a Center for
Transdiciplinary/Post-Disciplinary Study. We discover
fascinating futures to be explored in ignoring and crossing disciplinary borders.
SHL believes
that some crucial questions — about what it is to be human, about experience in a connected world, about the boundaries of
culture and nature — transcend old divisions between the arts, sciences and humanities; between the academy, industry and
the cultural sphere.
We engage in experimental projects with a "laboratory" ethos — collaborative, co-creative, team-based — involving a
triangulation of arts practice, commentary/critique, and outreach, merging research, pedagogy, publication and practice. Beyond commentary and discussion, we build: new media, interactive archives,
predictive models of social change, collaborative research workshops, art exhibitions.
The SHL agenda encompasses
• animating archives - regenerating, bringing to life,
and fostering new modes of interaction with the storehouses of human, cultural, artistic, scientific achievement - our focus is on the question of the relationship of the human past to efforts at conservation and preservation
• building bigger pictures - putting specialized in-depth research into the context of big human questions; questions, for example, of rapid social change and innovation, the ethical implications of information technology, the character of distributed digital communities, the politics of digital citizenship, the past, present, and future of intellectual property
• enabling co-creative collaboration - developing successful models of teamwork, learner-centered models of training (thinking through doing), and collaborative authoring tools and processes
• building bridges - establishing innovative partnerships between industry, museums, foundations, and high-level university-based research
Meltemi Editore releases Schermi Interattivi. Il cinema nei videogiochi
Schermi interattivi. Il cinema nei videogiochi (Interactive Screens. Cinema in Videogames) is a new collection of essays, edited by Matteo Bittanti, Research Associate at SHL, that explores the complex relationship between film and digital games. Published by Meltemi Editore, the book was originally conceived and written while Matteo was a Visiting Sholar at Stanford and it is part of How They Got Game: The History of Video Games and Interactive Simulations, an ongoing critical investigation of the history, role, and impact of games on society. Schermi interattivi. Il cinema nei videogiochi is the result of a collective effort. It features contributions from Stanford University's Henry Lowood and Galen Davis, who were joined by scholars from all over the world: Barry Atkins, Alexis Blanchet, David Bordwell, Luca Castiglioni, Mark Grimshaw, Rune Klevjer, Bernard Perron, Judd Ethan Ruggil, and Olli Sotamaa. The book, which is available in Italian for the time being, confirms SHL's dedication to critically delineate an evolving media landscape.
Schermi Interattivi. Il cinema nei videogiochi, edited by Matteo Bittanti, published by Meltemi Editore (Rome, 2008) official site http://www.scherminterattivi.org/
posted by Matteo Bittanti at 2:59 PM
SHL's Gordon Knox on Forbes.com Video Network
"What happens when brilliant engineers meet brilliant artists?" SHL's Director of Global Initiatives, Gordon Knox, was interviewed on the subject of innovation at the confluence of art and technology. Watch the video here.
Much of Knox’s work has been to create situations that advance potential through unusually cross-linked efforts. Many of the institutions and efforts Knox has developed provide diverse fields of knowledge and forms of creative practice with circumstances and projects that encourage new combinations of ideas and action. Forbes Magazine followed one of these strains in their April 7, 2008 “Innovators” section which examined Knox’s work with artists and corporations. Read the article here.
posted by Jeff Aldrich at 10:07 AM
Video from Cultural Hotspots event
The video of our workshop on "glocalism" with Claudio Prado, Director of Digital Policies in the Brazilian Ministry of Culture and SHL's Gordon Knox is now live:
Museum Piece: the race is on to preserve the cultural history of games.
(In reference to a recent article in the Sydney Morning Herald.)
Developed by the Barbican Museum in London, Game On examines videogames from the game design process, to the culture among gamers and beyond. Visitors can experience the past forty years of electronic gaming, play over 100 games on their original hardware and using the software that would have been used at the time.
The Game On exhibit has been seen by more than 1 million people and has toured venues such as London's Science Museum, the San Jose Tech Museum, and Chicago's Museum of Science and Industry. This display of many of the defining video games from the history of interactive entertainment has now opened at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) in Melbourne, Australia.
Stanford University's Henry Lowood, co-director of SHL and a contributor to Game On, is one of the few experts working to preserve video games and their culture. Curator of the university's history of science and technology collection, Professor Lowood has helped assemble a collection of 25,000 games, plus books, hardware, magazines and other gaming artefacts. There are only a handful of other significant public collections of games and gaming hardware in the world, such as those at the Museum of the Moving Image in New York, Berlin's Computer Games Museum and the Computer History Museum in San Francisco. Stanford University's games collection is open to the public but is restricted to research purposes.
posted by Motorato Ware at 3:34 PM
The Factory of Gestures: Body Language in Film
An audio-visual research project by Oksana Bulgakowa
Realized at the Stanford Humanities Lab
(in collaboration with Dietmar Hochmuth and Gregor Hochmuth)
The moment when the new technologies of photography, film, and the mass distribution of images upset the social and cultural practices of the 20th century is especially striking in Russia, where artistic experiments coincided with great social cataclysms and the search for a new expressivity of the body produced sometimes unparalleled results. As the Revolution disrupted social norms and traditions, Soviet society experienced a radical change in the gestural code. The abolition of gestural restraints was interpreted as the liberation of natural man: bad manners were re-evaluated as socially acceptable behavior, some body techniques that had been contained within the private space -- like washing or calisthenics -- were now accepted in the public sphere, and some gestures from the public sphere were transplanted to very private settings. The Soviet cinema, which had to reflect and invent a new social model, used very eclectic sources: the rhetorical gestures of political leaders, the symbolic gestures of the imperial code, the eloquent gestures of theatrical melodrama, the new gestures of decadent flamboyant hysterical bodies, the body language of American film stars, sports culture, and Taylorism.
Film proposed utopian, sometimes contradictory models of the new body behavior that should be imitated in reality. A new society striving to free itself from old rituals was developing a new design of clothing and living spaces, new standards of perception, and a new body language for a new anthropological type: homo soveticus, a specific version of a man of modernity.
When: Wednesday February 27: 12 - 2 pm Where: The Learning Theater on the ground floor of Wallenberg Hall (Bldg. 160)
This event is co-sponsored by the Division of Languages, Cultures and Literatures, and the Department of Slavic Studies. Please join us!
posted by Jeff Aldrich at 12:29 AM
Invitation: Pontos de Cultura // Cultural Hot Spots Workshop
A round table discussion of "glocalism" with Claudio Prado, Director of Digital Policies in the Brazilian Ministry of Culture.
The Stanford Humanities Lab invites you to participate in a workshop about an extraordinary socio-cultural experiment that has placed digital technologies and tools in the hands of disadvantaged communities across Brazil, transforming digitally excluded populations into producers, designers, programmers, even hackers.
Over the past five years, the government of Luiz Ignácio "Lula" da Silva has invested $8 million in the creation of 600 Pontos de Cultura: hotspots where, through a combination of re-purposed hardware, satellite web access, open source software, and the presence of skilled community activists, grassroots communities have developed through building a common social, cultural, and political cyberspaces.
Claudio Prado, the director of this initiative (alongside Brazil's Minister of Culture, the singer-songwriter Gilberto Gil), will present an overview of the past, present, and future of the Cultural Hot Spots project.
Since February 1, 2008, the Stanford Humanities Lab has been partnering with the Cultural Hot Spots project to establish an NGO that will extend the project's reach beyond the borders of Brazil. This workshop will explore how people from Stanford, the Bay Area research community, and beyond may become involved.
