Campus Stories - Interdisciplinary Approach
More than a Stanford concert hall, Bing is a high-tech music research lab
Like a well-designed sports car, Stanford’s new Bing Concert Hall looks great from the outside but is even more impressive when you peer under the hood. And Feb. 15-16, Bing’s high-tech engine will shift into overdrive when the groundbreaking electronic musicians of Stanford’s Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA) showcase their latest works. From…
City Beneath the City @ Stanford Archaeology Center
City Beneath the City opens on January 11, 2013, at the Stanford Archaeology Center. The exhibition consists of artistic displays of artifacts from San Jose’s first Chinese community, the Market Street Chinatown, which was destroyed in an arson fire on May 4, 1887. Through artist Rene Yung’s sensitive design, City Beneath the City explores the…
Stanford’s Bing Concert Hall opens this Friday with soundscape fanfare
A three-minute fanfare packed with sounds shaped and inspired by Stanford’s Bing Concert Hall – including harbor horns, a Canadian icebreaker, music student assignments and even the hall’s steel beams – will be the first music heard at the hall on opening night this Friday, Jan. 11. Faculty at the Department of Music’s Center for…
Checking in with the Chocolate Heads, Stanford’s student “movement band”
Jazz visionary and Stanford visiting artist William Parker made a point of reminding the musicians in the Chocolate Heads movement band to “think about the dancers.” That insightful instruction is uniting the sound and movement of the Heads as never before, and on the evening of March 8 the genre-mashing collective will share the Bing…
On purpose, rhythm, and writing your own story
It hasn’t escaped my attention that this blog seems a bit neglected as of late, but I hope you all will excuse me for the long silences because for the first time in what I feel like is years, I am going full force after something that I want: a goal, a purpose, a reason….
Stanford Arts looking ahead to 2016, the 125th anniversary of the opening of Stanford University
In a recent issue of Stanford magazine, Stanford President John Hennessy wrote about the many ways that The Stanford Challenge has been transforming the university through increased financial aid, interdisciplinary graduate fellowships, professorships and new facilities. He wrote that the Stanford Challenge, which concluded in December 2011 after raising $6.2 billion, was the most successful campaign in U.S. higher-education…
Robert Whitman: Local Report 2012
Local Report 2012 was an international media and telecommunications work in which Robert Whitman used live video and audio reports from approximately ninety participants around the world. Whitman used these reports to create a live sound and video performance, composing what he calls “a cultural map of the world.” Local Report 2012 was the latest…
This is your brain on Jane Austen, and Stanford researchers are taking notes
The inside of an MRI machine might not seem like the best place to cozy up and concentrate on a good novel, but a team of researchers at Stanford are asking readers to do just that. In an innovative interdisciplinary study, neurobiological experts, radiologists and humanities scholars are working together to explore the relationship between…
Design and mechanical engineering share a seat in Stanford’s Product Realization Lab
The signs on the chairs read, “Please do not sit,” but these chairs were in fact designed for sitting – or reclining, in one case. A selection of seven seats of distinction, products of the Stanford spring course ARTSTUDI 262, “The Chair,” are currently on view in Cummings Art Building. The temptation, of course, is…
Stanford anthropology team prepares fractured, historic objects for art gallery debut
Stanford students taking Barbara Voss’ anthropology classes have been sifting through San Jose’s 19th century Market Street Chinatown remains for years, but the thousands of artifacts that have been excavated have never been on view to the public, until now. A selection of 60 artifacts has been assembled to create City Beneath The City at…
Innovative Stanford class project turns urban studies students into filmmakers
A spatial documentarian, an urban historian and a film editor walk into a bar … Rather, they walk into a Stanford classroom to teach Urban Studies 166, East Palo Alto: Reading Urban Change, an innovative course that blends traditional academics, community service and art. Students in the course learn to combine historical film footage and hip-hop…
Artist takes performance to new heights at Stanford biological preserve
Visiting artist Ann Carlson is no stranger to unconventional performance sites, including frozen ponds, dairy farms and trains. But her latest project took her to new heights: Stanford’s biological preserve in the eastern foothills of the Santa Cruz Mountains. “Picture Jasper Ridge is a way to connect to the history that we stand on. It’s an…
Stanford visiting artist Ellen Lake creates a cultural paradox across decades
Ellen Lake discovered a golden age of 16mm film. For a brief period the diacetate Kodachrome film used between 1939 and 1942 produced lush color and appears today perfectly preserved, as opposed to triacetate film that came into popular use in the mid-1940s and did not hold up nearly as well. Lake, a visiting artist at…
Google Waltz Lab teaches Stanford students to think on their feet
It’s Monday night, and for Stanford senior Acata Felton that means one thing: dancing. Taking a break from work on her marine biology honors thesis, Felton is waltzing the night away at theGoogle Waltz Lab, led by Stanford’s renowned dance instructor Richard Powers. A video of Felton and her dance partner experimenting with a new iteration of a…
International interactive artist Camille Utterback delivers public lecture as part of the new Mohr Visiting Artist Program at Stanford
Pioneering artist Camille Utterback’s acclaimed interactive installations and reactive sculptures engage participants in a dynamic process of kinesthetic discovery and play. It is difficult to simply observe her work. It begs investigation and participation. To create her work, Utterback uses video tracking software and other sensors to react and respond to human movement and gesture. Her work…
Stanford Dance reconstructs Anna Sokolow’s signature work Rooms
On February 9 at 7 p.m. and again at 9 p.m., an American dance masterpiece comes to life. Anna Sokolow’s Rooms (1955), featuring music composed by Kenyon Hopkins for a jazz ensemble, is a powerful portrayal of the terrifying loneliness that afflicts even people living in the closest proximity to each other. Dr. Hannah Kosstrin, an assistant professor and…
