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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Philosophical Stages featured in Edutopia
Lynn Hershman Leeson and SHL premiere Sundance film in Second Life
On Monday 22 January and Wednesday 24 January our experimental facility in the online world Second Life hosted the première of Lynn Hershman's new movie " Strange Culture" as part of the Sundance Film Festival. In 2004 artist and college professor Steve Kurtz was preparing for a MASS MoCA exhibition that lets audiences test whether food has been genetically modified when, days before the opening, his wife tragically died of heart failure. Distraught, Kurtz called 911, but when medics arrived, they became suspicious of his art supplies and called the FBI. Dozens of agents in haz-mat suits sifted through his home and impounded his computers, books, cat, and even his wife's body. The government held Kurtz as a suspected terrorist, and, nearly three years later, the charges have not been dropped. He still faces up to 20 years in prison. Because he is legally barred from comment, the movie uses actors as avatars to tell this story of contemporary art, science, politics and paranoia. We have chosen to screen the movie on our island in Second Life because SHL is committed to exploring the intersections of the arts, humanities, science and technology, reaching out beyond the academy to address such matters of common concern. Guests will include Lynn Hershman, Steven Kurtz and Howard Rheingold. "Strange Culture is a film about Steve Kurtz. Because it is a film about one of the most prolific, innovative, as well as aesthetically adventurous and politically active artists, bridging between the old and the new millennium, it is also a film about the contemporary, its politics, art, and life. This is a film we should all watch." - Gabriella Giannachi http://festival.sundance.org/filmguide/popup.aspx?film=7546http://lynnhershman.com/newprojects.htm
The Hotel That Time Built
The current featured pick over at the Machinima Archive is " The Hotel That Time Built: The Regenerated Dante Hotel, Phase 1." This movie made in Second Life documents a Stanford Humanities Laboratory project called " Life to the Second Power: Animating the Archive," conducted in collaboration with the film and media artist Lynn Hershman Leeson, whose archives are housed at Stanford University. The project was partially funded by the Daniel Langlois Foundation. In the Lab, it was a collaboration of the How They Got Game Project with Michael Shanks' Presence Project, as well as Lynn herself. Henrik Bennetsen, Jeff Aldrich and Henry Segerman all have contributed and continue to contribute to the project. A propos, Lynn's latest film, " Strange Cultures," will premiere at the Sundance Festival next week, including two showings inside our project space in Second Life -- on Monday, the 22d at 3pm PST, and on Weds., the 24th, also at 3PM PST. " Strange Culture," in a nutshell, concerns the Steve Kurtz affair, with ramifications that cut across art, politics, science. Here is more information about the film, with even more here on the Sundance site. - Henry Lowood, HTGG2
Euclidean Crisis a finalist at IGF
Euclidean Crisis, an innovative real-time strategy game designed by a group of Stanford students with close ties to the How They Got Game project, has been selected as a finalist at the 9th Annual Independent Games Festival, Student Showcase Competition. It was one of ten finalists chosen form more than 100 entries. The design team for Euclidean Crisis, developed in only ten weeks, is Daniel Salinas, Travis Skare, John Shedletsky, and Douglas Wilson. Doug is a long-time core member of the HTGG team, and John is a veteran of STS145. The group designed the game for their 2006 Senior Project. It has so far won top honors at the 2006 Stanford University Computer Science Department Senior Project Faire, where it was awarded first prizes by Electronic Arts, VM Ware, Microsoft, Yahoo!, and the Electrical Engineering Department. The team describes the game as follows: "Euclidean Crisis is a multi-player real-time strategy game played using a touchscreen stylus and voice commands. Shapes and colors vie for supremacy in a retro-styled, cyberspace world. Your goal is to destroy your opponent's energy core while protecting your own. Units are controlled by drawing flight paths and command gestures." It's possible to download the game from the Euclidean Crisis website or watch a promo video if you'd like to see the game in action.
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