Designing Culture: Investigating the Link Between Technology and Culture, an interactive transmedia project by Anne Balsamo

If you are a regular reader of this blog, you know that I use it as an on-line filing cabinet. When I learned about Anne Balsamo's recently published book, part of a larger interactive transmedia project, I decided that it warranted more than a "plug" and a quick link.


It warranted a shrine.
For this reason, I've embedded a number of videos and presentations from the project's website, along with a host of links.  Prepare to spend some time exploring her work over time!  It is food for reflection.


DESIGNING CULTURE     "Investigating the link between technology and culture, this transmedia project is realized as a print book, a dvd, and this interactive flash website ." -Designing Culture


"Anne Balsamo is a Professor of Communication in the Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism and of Interactive Media in the School of Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California. She is a co-founder of Onomy Labs, 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 group at Xerox PARC that created experimental reading devices and new media genres. She is the author of Technologies of the Gendered Body: Reading Cyborg Women, also published by Duke University Press." -Designing Culture


Video Overview:

Designing Culture: the Technological Imagination at Work from Anne Balsamo on Vimeo.


BOOK
Designing Culture: The Technological Imagination at Work
Anne Balsamo, Duke University Press, 2011


BLOG: Designing Culture


DVD (packaged with the book)
Women of the World Talk Back: Gendering the Technological Imagination


PUBLIC INTERACTIVE WALLS: Designing Technological Literacies -Interactive Wall Books "Interactive Wall Books are large-scale dynamic mixed-media documents"
Here are a few links to online versions of the wall books for your convenience: Episodes in the History of Reading, Part 1     Episodes in the History of Reading, Part II  Episodes in the History of Reading, Part 3     Deslizate En El Tiempo: Epsodios en la Historia de la Communicacion (Developed for the Children's Museum of Mexico City)  Science for All Ages

XFR: EXPERIMENTS IN THE FUTURE OF READING  A museum exhibit.
(The above link will take you to the Onomy website's version of the exhibit. The project version can be found on the Designing Culture website.)


MAPS: Mapping the Technological Imagination Spatial Documents.
Learning to Love The Questions - an interactive semantac map, for the online journal VECTORS
Where is the Museum? Mapping the Distributed Museum -presentation at Museums and the Web 2011
Ways of the Hand: Tinkering in the Digital Age -presentation at DIY Citizenship: Critical Making and Social Media conference, 2010
Working the Paradigm Shift: The Cultural Work of the Digital Humanities - presentation at the Digital Arts Conference, 2008


VIDEOS
Tools for the Asking

Anne Balsamo HASTAC Presentation 4_16_2010 from IML @ USC on Vimeo.


Gendering the Technological How a Robot Got its Groove


Cool Fusion: Designing Culture - Working the Paradigm Shift



RELATED
Reviews of Designing Culture by Lawrence Grossberg, Cathy N. Davidson, and John Seely Brown (Amazon.com site for the book)
Balsamo's New Book Details Technological Imagination at Work
Annenberg News, 8/10/11
HASTAC: Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advance Collaboratory


Anne Balsamo worked on the following project:
Tangible Interface for Viewing the Aids Quilt

"This project will develop an application that enables collaborative browsing of a database of images of panels of The AIDS Memorial Quilt that have been “virtually stitched together.”  The application will be used with Onomy Lab’s Tilty Table, a tangible interactive device that serves as a display surface for large-scaled images." -(info from Anne Balsamo's blog)

Mobile Gesture Design at Nokia: Gesture Interaction Around the World

From the Nokia Conversations YouTube Channel:


The video explains it all.

(Fritz Desir, thanks for the link!)

Visual Culture

What is Visual Culture? It is a fairly new discipline of study that supports the point of view that understanding our world goes beyond words and text.

I'll be posting a bit on this topic, since I'm interested in figuring out how the concept of visual culture fits into my own theories about multimedia literacy and technology.

As I dig deeper into this field of study, I hope to gather and share what I find. One of my tasks will be to find a "short list" of visual culture scholars and see if there are is any cross-pollination between this group and people in the field of information/data visualization.

In searching for definitions of Visual Culture, I came across this description from the Visual Culture website from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

What is Visual Culture?

"(It) is concerned with everything we see, have seen, or may visualize-paintings, sculptures, movies, television, photographs, furniture, utensils, gardens, dance, buildings, artifacts, landscape, toys, advertising, jewelry, apparel, light, graphs, maps, websites, dreams-in short, all aspects of culture that communicate through visual means...."

Visuality and Textuality

"Visual Culture Studies presents a challenge to the textual model of the world that dominates so much thinking about culture. While analyzing cultural experiences, artistic practices, and even social interactions and history itself as so many texts to be read is an undeniably powerful approach, this textual bias ignores a vast realm of perception, experience and meaning in reducing culture to "reading." Visual Cultural Studies counters this bias by emphasizing the importance of the visual-even in textual objects, as when scholars consider the impact of design on the meaning of literature. In countering this earlier thinking, Visual Culture Studies does not set aside textuality, but draws it into dialogue with visuality, performativity, aurality, tactility, and so on. At the same time, Visual Culture scholars are beginning to question the broader dominance of visuality itself (what some have termed "ocularcentrism") and to look for ways to consider vision in the broadest cultural context without introducing new hierarchies of social practice."

What is Visual Culture? (University of Aberdeen)

"Visual culture has emerged as a constellation of various interests and numerous critical intersections in the visual and performing arts here at the University of Aberdeen. Because of its dynamic nature it constitutes less of discipline than a platform for exploring theoretical and creative collaborations between Film, Art History, Modern Thought, Museum Studies, Visual Anthropology, Scientific Imaging practices, new media, and computer engineering. The taught M.Litt reflects the diverse interests of faculty and students participating in visual studies. The M.Litt in Visual Culture is divided into two tracks: one designed to engage with critical thinking (the history of art and film criticism, theories of the visual, philosophies of perception and new media); and the other concentrating on creativity and media production (the internationally acclaimed filmmaker Raul Ruiz advises on avant-garde filmmaking, and courses are taught in film production)."

RELATED
(This list is not inclusive and will be updated.)

Visual Culture Website (University of Wisconsin, Madison)

Visual Culture Website (University of Aberdeen)

Georgtown University's Visual Culture Page (Martin Irvine)
Warning- it is ALL TEXT!

Aesthetics and Visual Culture (Bruce B. Janz, Director, Center for Humanities and Digital Research, University of Central Florida)
This site has an extensive number of links that cross numerous disciplines, last updated in 2006.

Journal of Visual Culture

Visual Culture at Middlesex University People Page

Visual Culture Blog (Oberholtzer-Creative)

The Visual Culture Awards - Info about awarded individuals

Infosthetics

Capella Web Capella Garcia Arquitectura- see picture below:




Via Visual Culture:

Pathway to a Sustainable Environment
"Heaven by Capella Garcia Arquitectura is an ephemeral space whose purpose is to show off the virtues of a constructional system using a plastic material, developed by the Resyrok Company, at the latest Casa Decor Fair in Barcelona, Spain, whose theme was “Pathway to a sustainable environment"

I came across the following video, created by Eirik Solheim, on the Visual Culture blog:

2008 in 40 Seconds

One year in 40 seconds from Eirik Solheim on Vimeo.

Nik Peachy is an edublogger who recently posted a great "how-two" about Soundscapes from SoundTransit.

According to Nik, SoundTransit "is a really wonderful formulation of an idea. It's not just a huge collection of Mp3 sound files from all over the world, but the sounds have been tagged by country and described and a visitor to the site can take a sound journey around the world."

From the SoundTransit website:

"SoundTransit is a collaborative, online community dedicated to field recording and phonography. In the “Book” section of this site, you can plan a sonic journey through various locations recorded around the world. And in the “Search” section, you can search the database for specific sounds by member artists from many different places. If you are a phonographer, you can also contribute your recordings for others to enjoy."

This would be a fun application to use in a social studies or music class! It also looks like a good application to use on an interactive whiteboard or display.