Stanford Humanities Lab: 12/3/06 - 12/10/06

Stanford Humanities Lab: 12/3/06 - 12/10/06


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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

Life Squared in Second Life: HASTAC In|Formation Year

Contributing to the HASTAC In|Formation Year, the Stanford Humanities Lab in collaboration with artist Lynn Hershman presented Regenerative Presence, Remixing the Archives of Lynn Hershman Leeson, work from the ongoing Life to the Second Power (L2) research project. This project is re-animating the existing archive of Lynn Hershman.

Converting the Hershman archive, now housed in the Special Collections Library at Stanford University, into a digital format of hybrid genre will allow users of the content to dynamically revisit the past, while simultaneously expanding the audience for this material. Specifically this means building a living archive of Hershman's work inside the 3D online world Second Life.

On September 30th, Hershman conducted a live tour of L2's work, underway on SHL's project development island in Second Life. Lynn's commentary, streamed live via the web, guided the audience through the project. Highlights included a brief documentary movie, a series of demonstrations of avatar-environment interaction, and a walk-through of the reconstruction of the Dante Hotel, site of the original 1973 installation project in San Francisco.

This event was filmed, recorded and photographed from multiple viewpoints as it happened. The material will be edited and compiled into a documentary, and made available online in the near future.