Faculty Search Candidate Presentation: Pietrobruno

posted: february 9. 2010

The School of Interactive Arts and Technology

Faculty Search Candidate:  Sheenagh Pietrobruno

Presents:  Miniaturization and Media

Tuesday, February 9, 2010

1:30 PM

Room 15-300

The issue of miniaturization is highly relevant to contemporary media practices dominated by small tech networked devices, such as laptops and palmtop computers. As users engage with miniaturized technology they may experience various sensations that are linked to its reduced size. These sensations range from feelings of intimacy or closeness with the digital data accessed through portable devices to the sense of possessing or having a certain control over this data. These affective responses are grounded in the ways that miniaturization and miniatures can be defined and determined by the human body.  

Feelings of intimacy, possession or control are not exclusive to users’ interaction with small digital devices since miniaturization is not unique to the digital era. The history of communication technology can be viewed in part as a history of miniaturization. These feelings can be elicited by the process of reduction and the fabrication of miniatures that characterize technologies preceding the digital. By examining various moments in the history of communication technology, I argue that the progression toward miniaturization facilitated through new media continues a process that is rooted in earlier forms of technology.  

Sheenagh Pietrobruno, Assistant Professor of English at Fatih University in Istanbul,

holds a PhD in Communication Studies from McGill University. She has been a

postdoctoral research fellow at Goldsmiths College, University of London and at the

Advanced Cultural Studies Institute of Sweden (ACSIS), University of Linköping. She is the author of Salsa and Its Transnational Moves (Rowman and Littlefield Inc. 2006). Her forthcoming book project is entitled, Treasures of Technology: Miniaturization and Miniatures.