Stanford Humanities Lab: 7/22/07 - 7/29/07

Stanford Humanities Lab: 7/22/07 - 7/29/07


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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

A second round of Roberta

Artist and SHL collaborator Lynn Hershman is referenced in Artnet column, L.A. Confidential:

"Themes of digital identity are explored at the Santa Monica Museum of Art in a show titled "Identity Theft," [...] Especially interesting is San Francisco-based artist Hershman’s alter ego, "Roberta Breitmore," or the Roberta Project, as it has become known. Cutting no corners, "Roberta" acquired a Social Security number and bank accounts, in addition to going on dates with strangers she met through personal ads, and meeting with a shrink while in persona to discuss her new "self." The exhibition documents such forays with letters and photographs and even Roberta’s garments. Hershman has now brought Roberta into the digital era as an avatar character, fit perhaps for the much-ballyhooed community website Second Life."

SHL's Life Squared project brought Lynn's Roberta into her "second life." Roberta is shown here at the opening of the gallery devoted to this project on SHL's showcase island Hotgates in Second Life.