FOR IM M EDIATE RELEASE
2.12.16
[EDITO R’S NO TE: For more information or to arrange interviews/photos, contact Margi
Caplan, Smith College Museum of Art, , mcaplan@smith.edu
Anne Balsamo, National Leader in Media Studies, Will Open
Smith College Colloquium with Public Lecture on February 25
“Lessons from the AIDS Memorial Quilt Digital Experience Project,” by Anne Balsamo—
Thursday, Feb. 25, 5 p.m., Weinstein Auditorium, Wright Hall, Smith College
NORTHAMPTON, Mass.— Anne Balsamo, Dean of the School of Media Studies at the New School for
Public Engagement in New York City, and a groundbreaking national leader in the field of Media
Studies, will speak at Smith College on Thursday, February 25 at 5 p.m. in Weinstein Auditorium, Wright
Hall.
Admission is free and open to all; reservations are not necessary.
Balsamo’s lecture, “The Cultural Work of Interactive Memorials: Lessons from the AIDS
Memorial Quilt Digital Experience Project,” is the keynote event in a three-day colloquium titled
“Futurisms II: Intersections: Digital Humanities, Interactive Media and Cultural Heritage,” the second in a
two-part, multidisciplinary and collaborative research project between the college’s Kahn Liberal Arts
Institute and the Smith College Museum of Art.
This program will bring together scholars from Smith and the Five Colleges in exploring questions
around preservation and display of cultural resources, as well as impacts and potentialities of
technological innovation on such resources.
In her lecture, Balsamo will discuss the creation of the digital memorial designed to augment the viewing
of the textile quilt, examining how this kind of public interactive is implicated in practices of cultural
reproduction—remembering, witnessing, archiving, and education.
By any measure, the AIDS Memorial Quilt, a collaborative commemoration begun in San Francisco in
1985 that has grown to expansive dimensions, is one of the most successful community art projects in
history. The quilt has become so successful, in fact—now comprising 48,000 3-by-6-foot individual
panels, covering more than 1.3 million square feet and weighing more than 34 tons—that displaying and
experiencing it in its entirety is no longer practical.
Still, argues Anne Balsamo, a principal coordinator for the AIDS Memorial Quilt Digital Experience
Project, the commemorative quilt is a vital archive and cultural resource in the ongoing struggle with
AIDS and HIV.
Balsamo, author of Designing Culture: The Technological Imagination at Work, emphasizes the
importance of “public interactives”—such as the AIDS Quilt Digital Experience Project—as emergent
forms of communication designed to engage conversation, cultural storytelling, entertainment and
education.
The AIDS Memorial Quilt is an activist archive, notes Balsamo. The activities that gave rise to the Quilt in
1987 are part of the history of the campaign for gay and lesbian rights in the United States. The quilt
literally stitches together a million memories, stories and lessons about the relationship between
individual lives, public culture, and political activism.
The AIDS Memorial Quilt Digital Experience Project creates interactive opportunities through various
forms of digital media, allowing Quilt viewers to:
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browse, view, search and zoom in on different angles and sections of the quilt using digital
media;
recount key events and historical aspects of the 30-year history of AIDS and the 28-year history
of the quilt;
locate, view closely and comment on specific panels and names on the quilt using mobile apps,
among other interactions.
Futurisms I: “The Ten Thousand Year Collection,” took place in December 2015 with keynote speaker
Elizabeth Merritt, founding director of the Center for the Future of Museums at the American Alliance of
Museums.
For more information on Futurisms, visit: http://www.smith.edu/kahninstitute/current.php
For current SCMA exhibitions, programs, and more, visit: smith.edu/artmuseum
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This release was updated on 2.18.16