[-empyre-] Welcome to Anne Balsamo our guest moderator for May, 2012:, Designing Culture: The Technological Imagination at Work

[Renate Ferro]

Welcome to Anne Balsamo (US)  for the May 2012 on -empyre-
soft_skinned space, Designing Culture: The Technological Imagination
at Work
I met Anne at Irvine at the Digital Arts and Culture conference a
couple of years ago.  It was before her book Designing Culture was
published but our conversations revolved around the subject of
tinkering which for both of us was an important part of the creative
process.  Anne's book now out is the one that I recommend to all of my
art, architecture and engineering students both undergraduates and
graduates as they begin their collaborative work in prototyping
physical computing projects. I am thrilled that she accepted the
invitation to moderate this month's discussion and I look forward to
her guest's discussion in our -empyre soft-skinned space.

A bit about the month--Each week for the month of May, Anne Balsamo
will engage guest participants in discussions about the “technological
imagination at work.”   The conversations will explore topics that
focus on practices and projects that “take culture seriously” as a
platform for technological innovation.  These projects—and indeed the
participants—demonstrate the rich possibilities when cultural theory
animates the technological imagination. She will be sending out this
month's introduction soon but I would like to welcome her to -empyre.
Her biography is below.

Anne Balsamo (US): Biography
In her new book, Designing Culture: The Technological Imagination at
Work (Duke, 2011), Anne Balsamo offers a manifesto for rethinking the
role of culture in the process of technological innovation in the 21th
century.  Based on her years of experience as an educator, new media
designer, research scientist and entrepreneur, the book offers a
series of lessons about the cultivation of the technological
imagination and the cultural and ethical implications of emergent
technologies.  Balsamo is full professor at the University of Southern
California, where she holds joint appointments in the Annenberg School
of Communication and the Interactive Media Division of the School of
Cinematic Arts.  From 2004-2007, she served as the Director of the
Institute for Multimedia Literacy at USC where she created one of the
first academic programs in multimedia literacy across the curriculum.
She was one of the co-founders of HASTAC (the Humanities Arts Science
Technology Advanced Collaboratory)--an international virtual network
that promotes the work of the digital humanities.  In 2002, she
co-founded, Onomy Labs, Inc. a Silicon Valley technology design and
fabrication company that builds cultural technologies.  Previously she
was a member of RED (Research on Experimental Documents), a
collaborative research-design group at Xerox PARC who created
experimental reading devices and new media genres.  She served as
project manager and new media designer for the development of RED's
interactive museum exhibit, XFR: Experiments in the Future of Reading
that toured Science/Technology Museums in the U.S. from 2000-2003.
Her earlier book, Technologies of the Gendered Body: Reading Cyborg
Women (Duke UP, 1996) investigated the social and cultural
implications of emergent bio-technologies.

Her curatorial and design work includes several projects of “public
humanities,” including an interactive documentary of the 1995 NGO
Forum at the 4th UN Conference on Women, an exhibition for the
International Museum of Women, a webcast of the 1996 Summer Olympic
Games, and, most recently (and currently) a series of digital
experiences to support the exhibition of the AIDS Memorial Quilt (The
Quilt in the Capital) in Washington DC in the summer of 2012.  Her
areas of research focus on the cultural implications of emergent
technologies, the design of public interactives, and the distributed
museum.  She has received support for this research from the MacArthur
Foundation, the National Science Foundation, and through the National
Endowment for the Humanities Digital Start-Up Grants.  Her first book,
Technologies of the Gendered Body: Reading Cyborg Women (Duke UP,
1996) investigated the social and cultural implications of emergent
bio-technologies.  Drawing on this early work in feminism and
technology studies, she is now involved in a global effort to build a
massively distributed online curriculum called FEMTECHNET that will
support the simultaneous delivery of a network of embodied and online
courses during September – December 2012.



-- 

Renate Ferro
Visiting Assistant Professor of Art
Cornell University
Department of Art, Tjaden Hall Office #420
Ithaca, NY  14853
Email:   <rtf9 at cornell.edu>
URL:  http://www.renateferro.net
      http://www.privatesecretspubliclies.net
Lab:  http://www.tinkerfactory.net

Managing Co-moderator of -empyre- soft skinned space
http://empyre.library.cornell.edu/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empyre