Jay David Bolter

Jay David Bolter is Director of the New Media Center and Wesley Chair of New Media in the School of Literature, Communication, and Culture at the Georgia Institute of Technology. His work with computers led in 1984 to the publication of Turing's Man: Western Culture in the Computer Age, a book that was widely reviewed and translated into several foreign languages. Bolter's second book, Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext, and the History of Writing, published in 1991 (second edition 2001), examines the computer as a new medium for symbolic communication. Together with Michael Joyce, Bolter is the author of Storyspace, a program for creating hypertexts for individual use and World Wide Web publication. In his most recent book, entitled Remediation, written in collaboration with Richard Grusin, Bolter explores the ways in which new digital media, such as the World Wide Web and virtual reality, borrow from and seek to rival such earlier media as television, film, photography, and print.

In addition to writing about new media, Bolter is collaborating to construct new digital media forms. Together with Blair Macintyre, he is building an Augmented Reality system to create "ghost movies": recorded video experiences, in which individual figures appear to float like ghosts in the physical world. Among the first applications is a series of virtual recreations of the Sweet Auburn area in downtown Atlanta. The history of this African-American cultural and economic center will provide a compelling test of the narrative power of this new media form.

This speaker appears on the Multimedia Criticism panel.