Bruce Damer

Bruce Damer was raised in the back woods of British Columbia, Canada, and made his way by a circuitous route to the back woods of Silicon Valley where he lives now with his love, Ms. Galen Brandt, on a farm in the redwood forest of the Santa Cruz Mountains. Besides collecting vintage computers and raising pigs the duo explore the frontiers of virtual worlds, immersive VR and virtual community Cyberspace.

Starting on the circuitous route in the early 1980s Bruce wrote some of the first graphical UI software for PCs leading a team at Elixir Technologies and Xerox to build a rendition of the Xerox Star interface now used worldwide in 30,000 organizations. Bruce located in Prague, Czechoslovakia in 1991 to work on establishing one of the first software laboratories behind the former Iron Curtain. There he also helped initiate a Silicon Valley style network of high tech companies and sponsored one of the first post cold war salons for the arts.

Finding his way back to the woods in Northern California in 1994, Bruce then established the Contact Consortium with Anthropologist Jim Funaro, with the goal of catalyzing a new type of Cyberspace, virtual worlds with living humans represented inside them as "avatars". The Consortium hosts three conferences per year and sponsors the Biota.org project which ponders the meaning of (artificial) life in digital networks. Bruce wrote a book about avatars and the work of his organization has been featured widely in world media and scientific publications.

Currently Bruce's company DigitalSpace is modeling future missions to Mars for NASA and working with Adobe on its Atmosphere 3D world platform. His newest venture is the establishment of an open, shared stakeholder marketplace and intellectual property conservancy called the Intercommons which is being designed to protect the ability of entrepreneurs to innovate and to capitalize on innovations in an era of strong monopoly. If you have further interest on any of the above, please see www.damer.com.

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