“Designing Digital Memorials” will highlight interactions among interactive media, crucial societal concerns, and the humanities. Initially created in 1978, The AIDS Memorial Quilt now includes more than 48,000 individual panels. If the Quilt were to be displayed in its entirety, it would cover more than 1.3 million square feet. It is the largest democratically created work of activist folk art in the US. With funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities and Microsoft Research, Balsamo collaborated with the NAMES Project Foundation and a distributed design team of digital humanists and creative technologists to create several digital experiences that enable people to browse the AIDS Memorial Quilt. She will present this project and demonstrations of the experiences in the context of her recent transmedia scholarly project called “Designing Culture: The Technological Imagination at Work.”

Biography:
Balsamo is dean of the School of Media Studies and professor of Media Studies at the New School for Public Engagement in New York City. She is a groundbreaking scholar and media-maker whose work links cultural studies, digital humanities, and interactive media. Her most recent book, Designing Culture: The Technological Imagination at Work(2011), synthesizes and theorizes the links between her cultural studies scholarship and digital media projects. She is co-founder with Dr. Alexandra Juhasz of FemTechNet, a project in support of distributed open collaborative courses related to feminism, technology, and media arts.

This event is free and open to the public. Please contact Sharon Irish with questions.