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
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