Stanford Humanities Lab: 10/29/06 - 11/5/06

Stanford Humanities Lab: 10/29/06 - 11/5/06


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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

From Counterculture to Cyberculture: The Legacy of the Whole Earth Catalog

Thursday, 9 November 2006, 7:30pm
Cubberley Auditorium, School of Education
http://www.stanford.edu/~shyeo/wholeearth.htm

Stewart Brand, Kevin Kelly, Howard Rheingold and Fred Turner

During the 1960s, student marchers chanted "Do not fold, spindle or mutilate!" as they railed against computers and the Cold War-era military industrial complex they seemed to represent. But within just three decades, computers had become emblems of

countercultural revolution. This symposium will feature a conversation with three people who played key roles in that transformation:

Stewart Brand, founder of the Whole Earth Catalog and co-chairman of the Long Now Foundation

Kevin Kelly, former executive editor of Wired magazine and author of Out of Control: The Rise of Neo-Biological Civilization and New Rules for the New Economy

Howard Rheingold, author of The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier and Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution

Fred Turner, moderator and assistant professor of communication, Stanford University, author of "From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Catalog, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism".

This event is sponsored by the Stanford University Libraries, the Department of Communication, and the American Studies Program.

It will be introduced by Henry Lowood, of the Stanford University Libraries and the Stanford Humanities Lab, and followed by a public reception.