Stanford Humanities Lab: March 2006

 

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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

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Crowds INTERMEDIA launched

An entirely new section of http://crowds.stanford.edu/ has been launched that includes the web-based components to the CROWDS book (forthcoming early May 2006 with Stanford University Press), video coverage of the November 4-5 CROWDS seminar including keynote talks and discussion, and the CROWDS database. Several additional galleries have been added to the main website as well.

posted by Jeffrey Schnapp at 6:10 PM

Bittanti and Lowood interviewed for Sky TV Italia

On March 13, Sky TV Italia journalist Teresa Earle interviewed Matteo Bittanti (visiting scholar from Milan, Italy) and Henry Lowood (Curator for History of Science & Technology Collections and SHL co-director). The interview—which took place in SHL's lab space in Stanford's Wallenberg Hall—will be broadcast on Sky Cinema in late March during “Sotto 5” (literally, 'Under 5 Minutes'), a popular show on new digital forms of expression such as machinima, fan-created videos circulating on the net and on mobile devices, and video games. “Sotto 5” is hosted by Carlo Lucarelli, a well-known television presenter and best-selling author.

Among other subjects, Matteo Bittanti talked about the interplay between cinema and video games, plus the rise of game studies as an academic discipline; while Henry Lowood discussed the emergence of machinima as a new cinematic genre, and videogames as the quintessential participatory medium. The video of the interview will be posted on this website later this month.

Links: Sky TV Italia

Sky TV Italy is part of the Sky Television Network, Europe’s most important digital satellite network. It offers extensive culture and entertainment programming, the latest blockbuster movies, international and foreign language channels, educational and fun programming for kids. Overall, more than 160 channels, plus radio and pay-per-view services. It was launched on July 31 2003 and has more than 3.6 million subscribers (Source: Sky Italia, January 2006)

posted by Jeff Aldrich at 9:27 AM

crowds.stanford.edu wins Addy silver medal


The SHL Crowds project website (http://crowds.stanford.edu) has been awarded a silver Addy for Advertising for the Arts and Sciences in the Bay Area in the San Francisco Ad Club's 2005 competition. Built by the Oakland firm Animated Design under the guidance of the SHL Crowds project, the website serves as a bridge between the Revolutionary Tides exhibition and the Crowds book, forthcoming with Stanford University Press in April 2006. It will be featured in the upcoming "Ephemera" issue of Vectors: Journal of Culture and Technology in a Dynamic Vernacular.

posted by Jeffrey Schnapp at 9:49 PM