Lecture redefines film for the information age

Jason Lipeles Staff Writer

Competing with video games and the Internet, the DVD industry has had to invent new ways to attract consumers, said Jay Bolter, a Wesley Professor of New Media in the School of Literature, Communications, and Culture at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Bolter gave a March 23 lecture entitled “Digital Technology and the Remediation of Cinema,” in which he focused on the concept of remediation, a concept coined in a novel he co-wrote with Richard Grusin entitled Remediation: Understanding New Technology. He defines remediation on his website as the process in which “digital forms both borrow from and seek to surpass earlier forms” (http://www.lcc.gatech.edu/~bolter/mediatheory.htm).

Bolter argued that filmmakers see computer games as a threat. He explained that filmmakers rival the interactive options of computer games by including new features to DVDs, such as choices to watch deleted scenes or alternate endings.

Bolter also showed three clips from the films Strange Days, The Matrix, and ExistenZ, illustrating where the makers proclaimed their discontent with so-called “new media,” such as computer games and the World Wide Web, within the movies’ dialogue and plotlines.

Bolter’s points regarding the viewer’s control of media and his discussion of reality sparked interest in several audience members. Dede Hourican, an Information and Technology Specialist at Vassar, said that after she went to the lecture, a Vassar resident called her to fix his DVD player. He was upset that the menu screen did not appear when he played the movie. Hourican connected this instance of an unhappy DVD viewer with Bolter’s explanation of remediation, as people expect DVDs to have interactive options like computer games. Hourican said that in this society, “the audience expects to have that kind of control.”

Maya Peraza-Baker ’08, a potential Media Studies major, was most intrigued by Bolter’s idea that “[we] become so accustomed to understanding the world around us through media because we’re so accustomed to seeing the world through media. It is important to note that it is processed and it isn’t your direct perception.”

Bolter does more than lecture. Vassar English Professor Michael Joyce, Bolter’s long-time colleague and friend, said, “Jay Bolter is a world figure and without doubt among the most influential scholars, authors, practitioners, scientists, and teachers regarding new media in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.”

Bolter has written three books on digital technology, including Turing’s Man: Western Culture in the Computer Age, Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext, and the History of Writing, and his most recent novel which he co-authored with Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Technology.

Lately, he has been working on a program called DART, which allows a person to experience virtual images in their actual surroundings. The person wears a specific headset and a backpack with a computer inside to see the virtual images.

Bolter and several graduate students and professors from Georgia Tech first tried the DART technology in Oakland Cemetery, the oldest cemetery in Atlanta, to see talking ghosts arise from their graves. The team believes that this technology will be used for informal education, artistic expression, and entertainment.