Dr. Anne Balsamo

Dr. Anne Balsamo

'Designing Culture: Reading Walls, World Expos, and Digital Memorials'

When: Thursday, Feb. 18, 4 p.m.
Where: Lecture Hall, Edith O'Donnell Arts and Technology Building

Open to the public; no ticket purchase required.

Parking: From Floyd Road, guests will enter campus at Lookout Drive (see map). Parking in Lot B is free for lecture attendees, and a shuttle will transport them to the lecture hall.

A leading expert in the field of media studies will present a talk on public interactives — an emergent media form that serves to drive social engagement in communal spaces such as urban streets, museums and transportation hubs.

Dr. Anne Balsamo, dean of the School of Media Studies at The New School in New York City, will give a lecture at 4 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 18, in the Edith O’Donnell Arts and Technology Building’s lecture hall. Her talk, “Designing Culture: Reading Walls, World Expos, and Digital Memorials,” is free and open to the public.

Balsamo will share details from projects in her design-research portfolio that illustrate the concept of public interactives.

Projects from her Public Interactives Research Team include the “AIDS Quilt Touch,” a mobile Web app where visitors can search for a name or leave a memorial in a digital book. 

When technological innovation and creative expression are combined to communicate with wider audiences, public interactives activate some of the best affordances of emerging media: using the power of culture to communicate and explicitly including the viewer in processes of knowledge production, said Dr. Kim Knight, professor of emerging media and communication in the School of Arts, Technology, and Emerging Communication.  

Previous to her post at The New School, Balsamo had concurrent appointments at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism and the Interactive Media & Games Division of the School of Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California.

Balsamo has written two books — “Technologies of the Gendered Body: Reading Cyborg Women” and “Designing Culture: The Technological Imagination at Work.” She was also a member of the distinguished Palo Alto Research Center in 1999, where she collaborated in the design of media for reading, exhibition, public art and cultural projects. 

She has a PhD in communications research from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.