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

Stanford Humanities Lab - SHL - is 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 and coordinate experimental projects that link the humanities with art, science and technology.

• Experiments - taking risks.
• A Lab - 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.
• Always simultaneously research, pedagogy, and publication.
• And practice - we don't just comment and discuss the posthuman in contemporary digital culture, or whatever, we build - new media, interactive archives, predictive models of social change, art exhibitions ... .

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 to

• animate archives - regenerate, bring to life and use the store houses of human, cultural, artistic, scientific achievement - a focus on the great question of the relationship of the human past to our efforts at conservation and preservation
• build bigger pictures - put specialized in-depth research into the context of the big human questions facing us all today - 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
• enable co-creative collaborative work - as a complement to the figure of the lone scholar - and because the whole is always more than the sum of the parts.

The Three Landscapes Project - my 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 are researching 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.

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