SPEAKER: Heidi J. Boisvert, Chair, School of Arts, Entertainment & Creative Technologies, Georgia Tech

 

Abstract: Dr. Heidi Boisvert will share case studies of past pop culture campaigns employing emerging technology to advance social issues in co-creative partnership with social justice organizations as well as her research methods and insights from the Limbic Lab, which employs biometrics, machine learning and predictive models to isolate effective narrative ingredients across various mediums of expression. She will also detail how this feedback loop between creative practice, tool-building, empirical research and community-engagement informs her vision for the new School of Arts, Entertainment and Creative Technologies.

Bio: Heidi Boisvert (PhD) is an interdisciplinary artist, experience designer, creative technologist, and academic researcher who interrogates the neurobiological and socio-cultural effects of media and technology. Simply put, she studies the role of the body, the senses, and emotion in human perception and social change. Boisvert is currently mapping the world's first media genome, while taking great care with its far-reaching ethical implications. She founded futurePerfect lab, a creative agency and think-tank that works with social justice organizations to design playful emerging media campaigns to transform the public imagination. She also co-founded XTH, a company creating novel modes of expression through biotechnology and the human body. Presently, she is working with David Byrne on Theater of the Mind, a new immersive theater piece. Boisvert is the Chair of the new School of Arts, Entertainment and Creative Technologies in the College of Design. She is also a Senior Research Fellow at the Norman Lear Center, a research affiliate in the Open Documentary Lab at MIT and a member of NEW INC’s Creative Science track.

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IPaT: GVU Lunch Lecture Series