Recent News
Talan Memmott joins LCC
as our first Distinguished Visiting Graphic Designer
Professor,
Wesley Chair of New Media Studies
Co-Director, Wesley Center for New Media
Ph.D, University of North Carolina, 1977
Research interests: Augmented Reality design, media theory
jay.bolter@lcc.gatech.edu
Prof Bolter's primary interest is the social and cultural impact of computers and the use of computers as new medium for verbal and visual communication. Publications include Turing's Man: Western Culture in the Computer Age, Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext, and the History of Writing, several book reviews and numerous articles on reading, writing, and visualization in computer environments. Projects include Developed Storyspace, a hypertextual computer program, in collaboration with author and educator Michael Joyce. I am currently conducting research with other professors in the GVU on multimedia systems for collaborative writing and on the use of text and speech in computer-controlled virtual environments. Graduate teaching includes courses in the rhetoric of electronic environments and multimedia design.
Associate Professor
M.F.A., Yale University, 1990
Research interests: Interface and interactive design, virtual
environments, digital art & culture, physiological computing for
enhanced sensorial awareness
diane.gromala@lcc.gatech.edu | website
Diane Gromala is an Associate Professor in the School of Literature, Communication, and Culture. She is an adjunct faculty member in Industrial Design and a faculty member of the transdisciplinary GVU (the Graphics Visualization and Usability Center).
Gromala's internationally recognized art and design work, Virtual Reality (VR) phenomenology and Physiological Computing has been performed and presented in North America, Europe, the Middle East Discovery Channel and the BBC.
Gromala is the co-author, with Jay David Bolter, of the forthcoming book Windows and Mirrors: Electronic Art, Design, and the Myth of Transparency, which reexamines the issues of human computer interaction and interface design from the perspective of media and cultural theory.
Gromala is on the Editorial Board of Postmodern Culture and Visual Communication and was Chair of SIGGRAPH's Art Gallery for the year 2000. In 2002, Gromala was named Chair of the United Nations' (UNESCO) Art, Science & Technology initiative. As a Senior Fulbright Fellow, Gromala has been a consultant for numerous transdisiplinary new media programs worldwide.
Throughout the 1980s, Diane Gromala worked as a designer and art director in the corporate realm, including Apple Computer, Inc. Her undergraduate and graduate degrees are from the University of Michigan and Yale University, respectively and she is a Fellow of CAiiA-STAR.
Ph.D., New York University, 1994 Cognitive, Clinical, and Forensic psychologies Research Scientist, Yale University Interests: The application of art-sci-tech practices to the medical and legal professions.
tom.ettinger@yale.edu
Tom Ettinger's current interests lie in promoting art-sci-tech practices that are positioned to solve important problems in the fields of integrative medicine and forensic science. With respect to medicine, the focus is on complementary and alternative medicine, which includes biofeedback, meditation, the expressive arts, and a wealth of techniques aimed at training mind/body harmony, self- regulation, relaxation, and holistic health. The past decade has witnessed the transformation and hybridization of traditional healing modalities via art-sci-tech practices. The result has been an impressive and imaginative array of interactive multimedia therapies, including VR immersion for anxiety disorders, VR biofeedback for meditation training, VR analgesia, and real-time brain imaging biofeedback (rtfMRI). Such is the cutting-edge of health technology in Integrative Medicine. With respect to forensic science, art-sci- tech practices have similarly revamped traditional methods and procedures (in this case, manual and analogical). Art-sci-tech practices have become pivotal for the purposes of reconstruction, simulation, model-testing, and illustration. This holds for data acquisition and interpretation, as well as for courtroom presentation, in criminal and civil forums alike. Examples include accident and crime scene analysis and civil patent infringement cases. The persuasive power of digital animation is well-established in jury research, and as the costs drop, we can expect an increasingly bold liaison of art-sci-tech and law.
Tom Ettinger's earlier work focused on communication theory and reception in the arts. He developed new empirical methods to disentangle and evaluate the viewer's conscious and unconscious responses to visual rhetoric. This led to research on clinically efficacious biofeedback displays, and then spiritual-artistic healing imagery in the context of hybrid health technologies. Prior to working at Yale, he was Visiting Scholar and adjunct professor at New York University. He has published and edited several works integrating psychology, science, and the arts, and served as Editor- in-Chief of the Bulletin of Psychology and the Arts (American Psychological Association), 1997-2000.
Research Fellow
M.F.A., Goldsmiths College, London
Research Interests: Digital art, ancient and contemporary culture
prema_murthy@hotmail.com
Prema Murthy is a new media artist who integrates design, drawing and digital processes to explore modes of embodiment. She has exhibited her work nationally and internationally at venues including the Whitney Museum of American Art (NY), the Walker Arts Center (MN), the MIT List Center for Visual Arts, the Jindal Art Center (Mumbai), the Generali Foundation (Vienna) and the Ars Electronica Festival (Linz). Awards include grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts and the Creative Capital Foundation.
M.F.A. in Literary Arts, Brown University
Research Interests: Hypermedia
Talan Memmott is a hypermedia artist/writer/editor originally from San Francisco, California. He is the Creative Director and Editor of the highly regarded online literary hypermedia journal BeeHive, which he started in 1998. Memmott comes to electronic art/writing from a background in visual art (painting, installation, performance, video), theater, music, and writing. He has also spent a number of years working in web development as a programmer and designer.
Memmott’s creative hypermedia work has appeared widely on the Internet and has been critically acclaimed for its visual and interactive design, as well as its content and concepts. Much of Memmott’s work circulates around ideas of an expanded field of textuality as afforded by hypermedia, and the creation of applications that are simultaneously creative and critical. He has produced numerous works that explore what he calls “network phenomenology”, most notably Lexia to Perplexia for which he was awarded the trAce/Alt-X New Media Writing Award in 2001 and received honorable mention for the Electronic Literature Organization's award in fiction. His work Self Portrait(s) [as Other(s)] was selected by the Iowa Review Web as one of their “Best of” for 2003.
Articles and essays addressing Memmott’s hypermedia work have appeared in publications including Book Magazine, Electronic Book Review, The New York Review of Books, Poets and Writers, Postmodern Culture, Realtime Australia, Teach Magazine, and Wired News. Memmott’s Lexia to Perplexia is the focus of a chapter on technotexts in N. Katherine Hayles’ Writing Machines. His own essays on electronic textuality have appeared in American Book Review, The Cybertext Yearbook 2002, and in a collection on New Media Poetry (forthcoming from MIT press).
Memmott has served as a tutor for the trAce Online Writing School, an Adjunct Professor of Digital Media at the Rhode Island School of Design, and is on the Board of Directors of the Electronic Literature Organization. Over the past few years he has been an invited speaker, panelist, reader and performer at various Conferences and Universities.
Director of Graduate Studies
Ph.D., Harvard University, 1974
Research interests: Interactive narrative and eTV,
interactive gaming, encyclopedic media
janet.murray@lcc.gatech.edu | website
My primary research interests are interactive design, interactive narrative, and the history and development of representational media. My latest book, Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace, asks whether we can expect this new medium to support a new expressive art form, comparable to the Shakespearean theater or the Victorian novel in its ability to move and enlighten us. I am mostly optimistic about this possibility. I am currently working on a textbook, Principles of Interactive Design, which unites the myriad traditional disciplines in which interactive designers are now trained into a single coherent digitally focused design vocabulary. I am working on several projects that prototype broadband entertainment and information applications, including work with interactive television and with history museums.
Ph.D., Cornell University, 1983
Research interests: Performance Studies, media studies,
cultural studies, popular music
philip.auslander@lcc.gatech.edu
Primary interest is in Performance Studies, particularly the relationship between various forms of performance and media. Publications include: From Acting to Performance: Essays in Modernism and Postmodernism; Presence and Resistance: Postmodernism and Cultural Politics in Contemporary American Performance; and articles on topics ranging from experimental theatre and performance art to stand-up comedy and rock music. Most recent book is Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture. Graduate teaching includes a course in media studies, with emphasis on the history and culture of television, recorded sound and digital media.
Ph.D., Univ. of Florida, 1999
Research interests: British Romanticism, the picturesque,
ecology, computing and the humanities
ron.broglio@lcc.gatech.edu
My current book project involves visual and verbal construction of picturesque landscapes from 1760-1840. As editor of Romantic Circles, I lead teams of students and teachers in constructing virtual landscapes, digital Romantic period poems and interactive digital research projects in MOO environments. Past projects include a FrankenMOO based on Frankenstein, interactive Blake poems, and Romantic weather in MOO environments. MOO's combine live-time interactivity of chatting with the graphical and text possibilities of the World Wide Web. Graduate teaching includes computing for the humanities and electronic pedagogy.
J.D., Texas Tech University, 1985
Ph.D., Texas Tech University, 1997
Research interests: Intellectual property, technical communication, global distance learning
tyanna.herrington@lcc.gatech.edu
TyAnna K. Herrington's background in law contributes to her interest in intellectual property issues, although her specialization in rhetoric and technical communication drives her ideological inquiry. Herrington's books treat issues in law: Controlling Voices: Intellectual Property, Humanistic Studies, and the Internet (SIU Press, 2001) examines the digital influence on ideological conflict in intellectual property law and A Legal Primer for Technical Communicators, Multimedia Developers, Graphic Designers, and other Creative Communicators (Longman Publishers, 2003) provides explanations of the legal problems that beginning creative developers are likely to encounter. Although many of her publications treat issues in intellectual property, the first amendment, and the work for hire doctrine, she has also published articles treating ethics and document design. Supported by a Fulbright grant to St. Petersburg, Russia, Herrington developed and continues to expand the Global Classroom Project, a distance learning project in technical communication that electronically links students and faculty in St. Petersburg, Russia with those at Georgia Tech. Herrington teaches technical communication and intellectual property courses both virtually and in the networked computer-based classroom. Her work in this and other digital projects created for the department emphasizes the importance and necessity of contextually based understanding of communication that requires experiential learning for students who face communication challenges and depend on digital connectivity, often across differing time zones, spaces, cultures, disciplines and bases of motivation.
Chair, School of Literature, Communication, and Culture
Ph.D., Columbia University, 1964
Research interests: Film studies, digital media studies
robert.kolker@lcc.gatech.edu
Robert Kolker is the author of a number of books in cinema studies, including the 3rd edition of A Cinema of Loneliness: Penn, Stone, Kubrick, Scorsese, Spielberg, Altman, and the textbook, Film, Form,and Culture that contains the first intro to film interactive CD-ROM. Kolker authored one of the first film essays online that made use of moving images. "The Moving Image Reclaimed"was published in Postmodern Culture. He recently edited a film edition of Postmodern Culture, that concentrated on a variety of essays that made use of digital technologies in the study of cinema:
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/postmodern_culture/v008.
He is currently working on a digital, annotated edition of the film Casablanca.
Ph.D., Univ. of Chicago, 1973
Research interests: Newtonian science, scientific narrative
kenneth.knoespal@lcc.gatech.edu
Primary interests are scientific and technological discourse. Dr. Knoespel has authored a book on the methodology of early scientific commentary and has contributed chapters to books on the strategies of scientific and technological discourse. Associate editor of the interdisciplinary science and literature journal, Configurations. He was a visiting professor at Cornell University and a senior fellow at the Edelstein Center for the History of Science and Technology at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem. Dr. Knoespel's current research includes the development of scientific communication within electronic networks and research in distance learning. His graduate teaching includes courses in international communication.
Ph.D. Carnegie Mellon University, 2003
Research interests: Expressive AI (Artificial Intelligence-based art and entertainment), including interactive story systems, story generation, game AI, robotic sculpture, AI and creativity, and cultural studies of AI
michael.mateas@lcc.gatech.edu
My work explores the intersection between art and artificial intelligence, forging a new art practice and research discipline called Expressive AI. My articles have appeared in numerous technology, art and theory venues
including AAAI, Leonardo, SIGGRAPH, Autonomous Agents, Digital Arts and Culture, and Dichtung Digital. I co-edited, with Phoebe Sengers, the book "Narrative Intelligence", a collection of writings at the intersection of AI and narrative. My current project, a collaboration with Andrew Stern, is "Facade", an attempt to move beyond traditional branching or hyper-linked narrative to create a fully-realized, one-act interactive drama. My previous artwork includes "Terminal Time", a mass audience, interactive, story generation machine that constructs ideologically-biased documentary histories in response to audience feedback, and "Office Plant #1", a desktop sculpture that responds to the social and emotional tone of email received by its owner. I've exhibited my artwork nationally and internationally, including the New York Digital Salon, the Carnegie Museum, the Warhol Museum, and Te Papa, the national museum of New Zealand. I have recently founded a game lab, whose mission is to push the technological and cultural frontiers of computer-based games. In addition to my faculty appointment in LCC, I hold a faculty appointment in the College of Computing. Prior to working on my Ph.D., I worked in industry, doing research in human-computer interaction at Tektronix Labs and Intel Labs.
Ph.D. Brown University, 1975
Research interests: Digital media project testing and management, web-based distance learning
pm2@prism.gatech.edu
Primary interests are in the analysis of digital media audiences, multimedia project management and testing and distance learning. Corporate consulting includes work in industrial use of the Internet, testing of digital products and the design and implementation of multimedia distance learning. Current research focuses on the impact of design theory on multimedia. Publications include co-authorship of Functional Writing, Readings in Technical Writing, and A Guide to Technical Writing, as well as articles on problem design and communication pedagogy. Current work involves the creation and testing of technology-enhanced courses and Web-based distance learning courses in the humanities and social sciences. Graduate teaching includes courses in distance learning, project design and testing, and Web demographics.
Ph.D., Stanford University 2000
Research interests: Phenomenology of differential geometry, technologies of writing, visualization, gesture, speech and performance
xinwei@lcc.gatech.edu | website
Primary interests are in critical studies of science and technology and in new media. Publications include The Virtual Edge -- Tracing the Postmodern Surgeon, and MediaWeaver -- A Distributed Media Authoring System for Networked Scholarly Workspaces. Digital artifacts include a series of physics microworlds, an interactive American Sign Language videodisc, MediaWeaver projects including Renaissance theater costumes and a history of Silicon Valley, and sponge:m3 interactive CD-ROM. Current project is a sponge:m3:TGarden responsive space. Graduate teaching includes a laboratory for designing and building two responsive media scenarios: (1) TGarden, using sensor-embedded clothing, MAX driven real-time video and sound composition software; and (2) Hubbub, marrying speech recognition with dynamic typography and projection video to explore the boundaries between speech and writing. Hubbub is part of a larger project exploring how cities conduct conversations through the medium of hybrid architecture.
Ph.D., University of So. California, 1996
Research interests: Film history and theory, tourism studies, interactive design
es79@prism.gatech.edu
Primary interest in feminist film theory and cross-cultural representation in popular culture. Publications include Stereoscopic Visions: Touring the Panama Canal in Visual Anthropology Review, Snapshots of Greece: The Touristic Gaze and East/West Politics in Journal of Film and Video, and Exotic Bodies, Distant Landscapes: Popularized Anthropology in the Nineteenth Century in Wide Angle. I guest-edited a special issue of Spectator on "Eccentric Consumption" and have upcoming articles applying my theory of the tourist gaze to CD-ROM travel games and virtual reality. I am currently working with Greg Vanhoosier-Carey on an educational CD-ROM on D. W. Griffith's Birth of A Nation. Graduate teaching includes video production and multimedia design.
PhD, Rutgers University, 2001
Research interests: Media studies, science studies, biotechnology and culture
eugene.thacker@lcc.gatech.edu
Primary research interest is the relationship between bodies and technologies in biotechnology and biomedicine. Other areas of interest include the intersections between art and science, new media art and science fiction. I am currently completing a book entitled Bioinformatic Bodies, and other publications include essays in the anthologies, Body Modification (Sage, 1999), LifeScience (Springer, 1999), Machine Time (V2/NAI, 2000) and Flesh-Eating Technologies (Semiotext(e), forthcoming). From 1997-2001 I was a part of the art group Fakeshop, which exhibited/performed work internationally at Ars Electronica, MIT, Siggraph and the Whitney Biennial. My current activities are focused on Biotech Hobbyist, an inter-disciplinary collective exploring collaborations between art and biology.
