[-empyre-] Week 3 on empyre: Welcome Anne Balsamo

[Renate Terese Ferro]

Throughout these past two weeks of our discussion on New Tools and
Technologies in 2015, Jason, Ben, Murat myself, and others have touched
upon the cross-disciplinary influences of humanities and culture. I am
pleased to introduce into our discussion Anne Balsamo. I met Anne in 2009
at the Digital Arts and Culture conference held at Irvine
http://escholarship.org/uc/ace_dac09
It was there that I heard of her research and interests in the
cross-disciplinary influences on play and tinkering in the creative
process of technological innovation. My lab, the Tinker Factory Lab,
programs many of its events revolving around these issues. Anne¹s book.
Designing Culture: The Technological Imagination at Work (Duke, 2011), has
been an inspiration to my thinking about these issues especially in
relationship to feminist thinking.

Just this past summer Anne and Liz Losh from the University of San Diego
introduced me to a network of feminist scholars, academics, and
technologists who have formed a collective Fem TechNet
http://femtechnet.org/about-the-network/who-we-are/ I welcome Anne today
and hope she will share her research and current thoughts about thinking
through new tools and technologies.

Anne Balsamo serves as the Dean of the School of Media Studies at The New
School in New York City. Her most recent book, Designing Culture: The
Technological Imagination at Work (Duke, 2011) examines the relationship
between culture and technological innovation, with a particular focus on
the role of the humanities in cultural innovation. In 2012, she and
Alexandra Juhasz co-founded FemTechNet. Balsamo served as one of the key
designers of the Distributed Open Collaborative Course (DOCC) offered by
FemTechNet in 2013. Previously she was a Full Professor at the University
of Southern California where she held 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. In 1998, she left a tenured faculty position at Georgia
Institute of Technology to join a research-design group at Xerox PARC that
created experimental reading devices and new media genres. In 2002, she
co-founded, Onomy Labs, Inc. a Silicon Valley technology design and
fabrication company that builds cultural technologies. Her first book,
Technologies of the Gendered Body: Reading Cyborg Women (Duke UP, 1996)
investigated the social and cultural implications of emergent
bio-technologies.




Renate Ferro
Visiting Assistant Professor of Art,Cornell University
Department of Art, Tjaden Hall Office:  306
Ithaca, NY  14853
Email:   <rferro at cornell.edu <mailto:rtf9 at cornell.edu>>
URL:  http://www.renateferro.net <http://www.renateferro.net/>
      http://www.privatesecretspubliclies.net
<http://www.privatesecretspubliclies.net/>
Lab:  http://www.tinkerfactory.net <http://www.tinkerfactory.net/>

Managing Co-moderator of -empyre- soft skinned space
http://empyre.library.cornell.edu/