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

[Ana Valdes]

Such a nice presentation, Renate! I met Anne (hello Anne nice to share with you a virtual space) in Oslo and in Stockholm, with Hal Foster. A great conference and some very enjoyable hours in my hometown at that time. 
I think Anne's books about knowledge and technology are belong the books anyone should read to understand the shift pf the paradigme between the analog world and the virtual world.
Cheers
Ana

Skickat från min iPhone

2 maj 2012 kl. 11:50 skrev Renate Ferro <rtf9 at cornell.edu>:

> 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
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