Stanford Humanities Lab: 8/13/06 - 8/20/06

 

HumanTech OPENsourceLab MetaverseU Projects Partners Board Contact
 
 
Stanford Humanities Lab Home
 
 

 
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

 

Stanford Humanities Lab builds presence in Second Life

Following on the decision to develop the Life Squared project on a private island in Second Life, SHL has established a virtual center on the mainland of this online digital world: SHL-SecondLife (SHL-SL).

In what promises to be a perpetual work in progress, a series of galleries has been created to showcase SHL's research. Currently on view are a sampling of political posters sourced from Revolutionary Tides: The Art of the Political Poster, 1914–1989, streaming video of “Antigone Reflected” from the Philosophical Stages project, as well as references and links to other ongoing work: Life Squared, Virtual Mandala, and others.

In addition to its function as a gallery of our work, SHL-SL provides space for meetings and presentations, incorporating multiple streaming video and audio feeds and other tools to facilitate collaboration among SHL staff and our cohort of researchers. Visit SHL-SL in Second Life at http://slurl.com/secondlife/Cayuga/176/199/60/.