For more than two decades, I worked with Prof. Blair MacIntyre who heads the AEL (Augmented Environments Lab) to explore new forms of informal education, personal expression, and entertainment. We designed and built a number of prototypes and experimental systems for Augmented Reality. More recently we created experiences in VR, and especially WebVR, a protocol that allows users to access VR through a web browser on a smartphone, computer, or through a VR headset. We created a digital companion to our book Reality Media (MIT Press, 2021) using this technology. Reality Media places virtual and augmented reality in the tradition of other media, especially film and television, that fashion visual and auditory realities for their viewers. The digital companion illustrates this tradition both as a website and an immersive experience. Now the AEL is experimenting not only with "true" 3D VR, but also with cinematic VR (CVR) or 360 video. Ph.D. students in our lab are also exploring the aesthetics of generative AI, especially for the creation of traditional screen-based cinema and potentially CVR.
I study how new (digital) media affect and are affected by earlier media and media forms, including film, television, and print. That work began with Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext and the Remediation of Print (first edition 1991; second edition 2001 by Lawrence Erlbaum). Writing Space examined the computer’s place in the history of symbolic (textual) media. I argue that digital hypertext is the remediation of the printed book. Remediation: Understanding New Media (coauthored by Richard Grusin, MIT Press, 1999) focuses on the relationship between visual digital expressions (such as computer games and the World Wide Web) and earlier media forms (such as film and television). We argue that digital forms both borrow from and seek to surpass earlier forms, and we give this process the name “remediation.” Windows and Mirrors (coauthored with Diane Gromala, MIT Press, 2003) examines digital art as a radical form of interface design. My most recent single-authored book The Digital Plenitude was published by MIT Press in 2019. It focuses on two developments in the second half of the twentieth-century century that have helped to define our media culture in the twenty-first: the decline of cultural hierarchy and the rise of digital media. There is a digital companion at www.digitalplenitude.net.
Jay David Bolter is the Wesley Chair of New Media and co-Director of the Augmented Environments Lab at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He has lectured extensively on contemporary media culture in the United States and Europe and as served as a guest professor at Malmö University in Sweden. His books include Remediation (1999), with Richard Grusin; Windows and Mirrors (2003), with Diane Gromala; and The Digital Plenitude: The Decline of Elite Culture and the Rise of New Media (2019). In the early 2020s, Bolter worked with colleagues Blair MacIntyre and Maria Engberg to create AR and VR experiences for cultural heritage, entertainment, and expression. The work led to the publication of Reality Media: Augmented and Virtual Reality (Fall 2021, MIT Press).
You can also download my CV.
