Stanford Humanities Lab: May 2005


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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

SCI-Arc // SHL project on Augmented Architecture under discussion

A planning meeting took place at the Culver City architecture studio of the dean of SCI-Arc (Southern California Institute of Architecture), Eric Owen Moss, involving SHL co-director Jeffrey T. Schnapp, Eric Owen Moss, and several SCI-Arc faculty (Ming Fung, Florencia Pita, Michael Speaks, Benjamin Bratton), regarding a future joint initiative concerned with various emerging forms of augmented or expanded architecture. Further discussions will take place over the summer with the project launch slated for the fall of 2005.

SHL Invites Applications for New Projects

The Humanities Lab is accepting applications for new research projects to start in the 2005-2006 academic year. Project design issues, eligibility considerations, deadlines and other questions are all answered on the application process page, where you will also find a link to a downloadable application form in PDF format.

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SCI-Arc // SHL project on Augmented Architecture under discussion

SHL Invites Applications for New Projects