Stanford Humanities Lab - SHL - pursued experimental research and development across the Humanities and Arts in a Center for Transdiciplinary Study.
You could also say post-disciplinary - because we think that there are some fascinating futures to be explored in ignoring and crossing disciplinary borders.
We ran, encouraged, supported and coordinated experimental projects that link the humanities with art, science and technology.
- Experiments - taking risks.
- With a "laboratory" ethos - collaborative, co-creative and team-based.
- Involving a triangulation of arts practice, commentary/critique, and outreach beyond the academy into industry and the public sphere.
- Merging research, pedagogy, and publication.
- And practice - we don't just comment and discuss the importance of renaissance optical instruments in the history of seeing, the character of the crowd in the nineteenth century, the posthuman in contemporary digital culture, or whatever. We build - new media, interactive archives, predictive models of social change, new courses, collaborative research workshops, art exhibitions ... (See my comments on practice as research).
SHL believed that some crucial questions about what it is to be human, about experience in a connected world, the boundaries of culture and nature, transcend the old divisions between the arts, sciences and humanities, between the academy, industry and the cultural sphere. Especially today - with new developments in bio-tech, digital culture, global society.
So SHL had a transhuman and transdisciplinary agenda
- animating archives - regenerate, bring to life and use the store houses of human, cultural, artistic, scientific achievement - a focus on the great questions of the relationship of the human past to our efforts at conservation and preservation, drawing upon the history of the humanities to give creative context for addressing contemporary cultural concerns
- building bridges to bigger pictures - put specialized in-depth research into the transdisciplinary 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, understanding urban experience, past and present, tracking
- enabling co-creative collaborative work - one of the traditional cornerstones of academic collegiality, now foregrounded more generally with the emergence of powerful social and participatory software - because many questions of common human concern beg multidisciplinary attention, and because the whole can often be more than the sum of the parts.
a selection
Digital Hotspots - enabling cultural creativity
How They Got Game - the history and culture of interactive simulations and video games
Crowds - a collaborative research project investigating the importance of the crowd in the modern era - led to a major exhibition "Revolutionary Tides: the art of the political poster 1914-1989"
Artificial Eyes - Investigating the relationship between natural science and art in the early modern period through reconstructing observational instruments and the skills required to use them
See Artereality - a manifesto for advanced arts education in the US based upon our experiences in SHL
See my comments on the idea of a Humanities Lab
See Archive 3.0 on the future of cultural memory
My projects within the SHL agenda:
The Three Landscapes Project - a project in psychogeography and deep-mapping with Brith Gof - was my first experience of SHL. We were advised to limit our scope to one landscape - California! - and then SHL refused us funding!
Not to be deterred, I came back a couple of years later with another proposal and my work with SHL began with the Traumwerk project - exploring collaborative authoring systems and participatory media. Traumwerk led directly to the Wallenberg funded project Co-creating cultural heritage - where we researched the potential of such participatory media to enable the building of rich historical and archaeological experiences of cultural heritage and belonging. We were among the first to explore the potential of such Web 2.0 participatory software in research, pedagogy and cultural creativity.
Traumwerk experience lies also behind the Presence project - a collaboratory exploring presence and absence, mediation and virtuality in performance and new media.
Critical Studies in New Media - Stanford's research workshop devoted to new media.
Life-Squared takes all this further with an art installation in the virtual world Second Life - where the remains of an artwork by Lynn Hershman in a hotel room in San Francisco are regenerated as a new kind of encounter and mystery.
Anglo-American-Antiquarians is an international research network looking at the antiquarian tradition in the context of the history of science. A major objective is to produce the Bibliotheca Universalis Antiquaria - a new kind of digital library and research environment facilitating the comparative study of what we propose is a key branch of early science, hitherto misunderstood.
Stanford Strategy Studio - aiding high level planning and decision making as well as grass-roots culture change by building bridges across diverse interests and expertise in order to see the bigger picture around matters of common and pressing human concern such as environmental change, economic sustainability, local identity and global heritage.
My Metamedia Lab was closely affiliated with SHL - we shared resources and projects.
SHL's facility in the online world Second Life - avatar Archaeolog overlooks the Dante Hotel
