I recently attended a lecture given by Dr. Anne Balsamo, a professor of media studies and Dean of the School of Media Studies at The New School in New York, held at UT Dallas. The lecture was full of buzzwords, but mainly concerned what she calls “public interactives”, a subject also covered in her book Designing Culture: The Technological Imagination at Work. Public interactives are an emerging form of interactive technology used to engage consumers and communities in public spaces. Dr. Balsamo considers it a public art form, one which experiments with perceptions of mobility, scale, and even the design of public spaces. It is also a kind of pervasive computing that allows advertisers and organizations to engage with the public wherever they may be. It is all based on what she called the poetics of interactivity. From my understanding, this is a kind of visual poetry, using imagery to enhance how a viewer reads a page and engender a response similar to what art or written poetry might. In other words, it has to be seen to be believed and understood.

Dr. Balsamo

Most of the practical applications were commercial in nature, including interactive ads, virtual shopping stalls, and “augmented window shopping”, screens that allow consumers to literally shop at store windows and have the products delivered straight to their home or hotel room. Dr. Balsamo joked that you could even buy windows at the screens. She also hinted at the technology’s potential for art and diplomacy, using the example of the collaboration between the Saudi and Chinese governments in funding the interactive light show “The Treasure”, seen at the 2010 Shanghai Expo. Dr. Balsamo described the light show as an example of the "poetics of space" in action. That means the entire space is utilized in affecting visitors. She also delved into the possibilities of interactive memorials, and her slides included a photo of a headstone with a QR code. A visitor to the gravesite scans that code with their smart phone and is directed to a website where they can see that person’s life story. It gives the family the ability to share their loved one with more people than they could with a newspaper obituary.

"The Treasure"

Dr. Balsamo ended the presentation with a discussion of a particularly ambitious interactive memorial: the AIDS Quilt Touch project, something she is very proud to be part of. When the original quilt was displayed on the National Mall in 1987, it consisted of over 1000 panels memorializing the people, a large number of them being gay, who died nationwide as a result of the AIDS epidemic. It only grew on subsequent tours and now consists of over 40,000 individual panels. According to Dr. Balsamo, it would now take up to 33 days to see the entire quilt, the problem AIDS Quilt Touch is meant to solve. The project has created a website that allows users to view and browse every piece of every panel in the physical quilt. The website is still in the alpha stage, but the group is also developing a mobile version and has already created interactive displays for use in public exhibitions. The project will allow the public to view the AIDS quilt at their leisure year round, and could preserve the memory of those who died long after the original quilt has been lost.