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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Modernist Studies Association names Crowds best book
 Crowds, the publication resulting from a collaborative research project at SHL that examines the importance of the crowd in the modern era, has been awarded the Modernist Studies Association's (MSA) prize as the best book in the field of studies of modernism and modernity published in 2006. This ambitious, graphically innovative volume presents several layers of meditation on the phenomenon of collectivities, from the scholarly to the personal. Quoting from the MSA announcement:
"The prize committee found the book a fascinating, timely, and inexhaustibly rich contribution to modernist studies -- the kind of book that people both within our field and without will be turning to for many years to come.Given the collective nature of the Crowds project, the committee wishes to formally invite all contributors to the volume to stand and be recognized at the awards luncheon, to be held at noon on November 3 as one of the highlights of the MSA world congress in Long Beach." Visit the MSA conference site at http://www.usc.edu/schools/college/conferences/msa9/
Life Squared at Montreal Museum of Fine Arts
 SHL's Life Squared project, re-animating the archive of artist Lynn Hershman, is bridging worlds with parallel exhibit spaces in Second Life and at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, in a new show opening today. Paraphrasing from the MMFA website: Marking the tenth anniversary of the Daniel Langlois Foundation for Art, Science, and Technology, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts presents e-art : New Technologies and Contemporary Art – 10 Years of Accomplishments of the Daniel Langlois Foundation. The included works all demonstrate the part played by digital technology in the transformation of a work of art and the artists’ interest in the phenomena of language, encoding and the translation of one system and one reality into another. [...]
The museum's exhibit room dedicated to Hershman's Dante Hotel work (one of three Hershman projects presented) has been cloned adjacent to the regenerated Dante Hotel on SHL's lab island in Second Life. The Canadian and Second Life rooms are visually and bi-directionally linked over the 'Net, allowing visitors in either real or virtual space a behind-the-mirror view of the alternate world.
Asian-American Art receives Getty Foundation Grant
SHL's Asian-American Art project is the recent recipient of a generous grant from the Getty Foundation. Funds from the Getty will support Asian American Art, A History, 1850-1970, a major scholarly book to be published by Stanford University Press. The publication is the first survey of its kind and will include ten essays by leading scholars, biographical profiles of 150 artists, and more than 400 images. Asian American Art, A History, 1850-1970 will be released in Fall, 2008.
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