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Cantor Center for Visual
Arts
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A November 3 Wall Street Journal headline
asked, “Are video games ready to be taken seriously
by media reviewers?” Academics already consider
them worthy of sociocultural study: a fall conference
on the subject in the Netherlands drew hundreds of scholars.
At Stanford, the Humanities Lab project “How They
Got Game” explores the history and cultural impact
of video and PC games; the science, technology and society
program offers a related course.
Now the lab’s research has inspired a Cantor
Center exhibition, Fictional Worlds: Storytelling
and Computer Games, based on the premise that interactive
simulations, computer games and video games will be
the dominant narrative form and communication medium
of this century. Traditionalists can check out the competition
through March 28. An all-day adjunct conference, “Story
Engines: A Public Program on Storytelling and Computer
Games,” takes place at the center’s auditorium
on February 6.
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Cantor Center for Visual
Arts
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She was an unlikely pioneer: one of Victorian society’s
elite, she raised six children amid all the perks accorded
colonial officials’ families in India. But for
Julia Margaret Cameron, a second life began in 1863,
when at age 48 she was given a camera. At a time when
photography was largely considered a technological advance,
Cameron turned it into an art form, creating soulful
portraits and ethereal tableaux. Her subjects were some
of England’s best-known figures—Darwin,
Tennyson, Carlyle—as well as her family (she was
Virginia Woolf’s great-aunt). But Cameron also
got her household servants to pose for depictions of
religious and literary scenes.
A small Cameron exhibit at Stanford’s Cantor
Center till February 29 gives a nod to the major show
of her work at the Getty in Los Angeles and coincides
with a new biography. From Life: Julia Margaret
Cameron and Victorian Photography (Palgrave Macmillan,
2003), by Victoria Olsen, PhD ’94, has won wide
praise in Britain, particularly for its revelations
from a trove of unpublished letters.
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