Stanford Humanities Lab: May 2006

Stanford Humanities Lab: May 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

Revolutionary Tides inspires prize-winning PWR paper

Alex Blackstock is to be awarded the second annual Geballe Prize for Writing for the paper "Seeing Red: The Bolshevik Poster Propaganda Campaign and the Psychology of Social Cohesion" written for Stanford's Program in Writing and Rhetoric course, "Speaking with Things: The Rhetoric of Display." We are pleased to learn that the exhibition "Revolutionary Tides: The Art of the Political Poster, 1914–1989" at the Cantor Arts Center provided Alex with visual material inspiring the research for this paper.

Life² receives Langlois funding

Life to the Second Power—Animating the Archive, was awarded Cdn$49,000 by the Daniel Langlois Foundation, for the project's pilot phase running June 2006 to June 2007. This online meta-narrative will integrate real and virtual architecture, avatars, artifacts, somatic characters and situational components such as site tagging, GPS, and GIS modeling into a mixed reality and pervasive gaming environment. The project will re-animate the existing archive of Lynn Hershman Leeson, now housed in the Special Collections Library at Stanford University.

New foresight thinking blog and resources

With the recent press around the Stanford Center for Critical Foresight (a part of SHL), we are updating the online presence.

http://foresight.stanford.edu/

The lab site now includes thoughts, new ideas, and pointers that are being generated in the foresight thinking courses and research discussions. Over the summer we plan to being posting syllabi and readings from the courses.