See Artereality - a manifesto for advanced arts education in the US based upon our experiences in SHL

With Henry Lowood (Stanford Libraries) and Jeffrey Schnapp (Comparative Literature, Stanford), I direct Stanford Humanities Lab.

Stanford Humanities Lab - SHL - pursues 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 run, encourage, support and coordinate 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 believes 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 has 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.

SHL projects

see http://shl.stanford.edu for more detail

See my comments on the idea of a Humanities Lab

See Artereality - a manifesto for arts education

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.

Traumwerk experience lies also behind the Presence project - a collaboratory exploring presence and absence, mediation and virtuality in performance and 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.

My Metamedia Lab is closely affiliated with SHL - we share resources and projects.

SHL's facility in the online world Second Life - avatar Archaeolog overlooks the Dante Hotel