Nick Montfort
Computer scientist, poet, and scholar of digital media.
Nick Montfort works as both a computer scientist and poet, serving as a digital media professor at MIT and running the Trope Tank lab there. He also splits his time with the University of Bergen, where he heads a node on computational narrative systems at the Center for Digital Narrative. Montfort has authored seven books of computer-generated literature and six MIT Press titles, many co-written. His digital creations often take the form of short programs. He lives in New York City.
Quick Facts
- Birth name
- Nicholas Montfort
- Field
- Poetry
- Interactive Fiction
- Electronic literature
- Education
- University of Pennsylvania (PhD)
Facts from the source article.
Computer-generated books
Montfort's The Truelist (Counterpath, 2017) is a computer-generated book-length poem produced by a one-page computer program, with the code included at the end of the book; he also made a complete studio recording of it available at PennSound. His book #! (pronounced "shebang") uses the programming languages Python, Ruby, and Perl to create impressions of machines based on language rules, and includes a Python version of "Taroko Gorge" that is available online in JavaScript and has been remixed by many authors, with some remixes collected in The Electronic Literature Collection: Volume 3. Montfort collaborated with six others on 2x6 (Les Figues), which includes six short programs and the narrative poems they generate in English, Spanish, French, Polish, Japanese, and Russian; this project has been exhibited and is available online. Autopia, which assembles short sentences from automobile names, appears as a printed book (Troll Thread), a gallery installation, and a web page. Several of his printed computer-generated books were generated with programs written during National Novel Generation Month (NaNoGenMo), including three self-published books: Hard West Turn (2018 Edition), Megawatt, and World Clock, written during the first NaNoGenMo in 2014. Translations of World Clock and Megawatt were published in Polish and German respectively. Montfort founded and edits the Using Electricity series of computer-generated books from Counterpath. In November 2019 he announced "Nano-NaNoGenMo," calling for short programs of 256 characters or less to generate novels of 50,000 words or more, and contributed several such programs himself.
Interactive fiction
Montfort's interactive fiction game Book and Volume (2005) was a finalist in the 2007 Slamdance Guerilla Gamemaker Competition, but he withdrew from the competition in protest after Super Columbine Massacre RPG! was excluded. Ad Verbum (2000), a wordplay-based game requiring the player to figure out stylistic constraints and type commands to solve puzzles, received the 2000 XYZZY Award for Best Puzzles. His book Twisty Little Passages: An Approach to Interactive Fiction (2003) was described by Steve Meretzky as a thoroughly researched history and brilliant analysis of the genre.
Writing on digital media
Montfort wrote on the group blog Grand Text Auto in the early 2000s. He co-edited The Electronic Literature Collection: Volume 1 and The New Media Reader (both 2003). He was one of ten co-authors of 10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10 (MIT Press, 2012), which examines the titular one-line BASIC program for the Commodore 64 and addresses randomness, regularity, and the maze in popular culture. His most recent book is The Future (MIT Press, 2017), described by a futures studies reviewer as written by an outsider to the foresight community who examines how artists, inventors, and designers have imagined the future; the book was reviewed as striking a balance between planning and poetry.
Works
Montfort's works include The Truelist (2017), Autopia (2016), 2x6 (collaboration, 2016), Taroko Gorge (2009), Ream/Rame (collaboration with Anick Bergeron, 2008), 2002: A Palindrome Story (collaboration with William Gillespie, 2002), the Grand Text Auto group blog, Book and Volume (2005), Implementation (collaboration with Scott Rettberg, 2004), Ad Verbum (2000), and Winchester's Nightmare (1999). His books include The Future (MIT Press, 2017), Exploratory Programming for the Arts and Humanities (MIT Press, 2016), and Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System (with Ian Bogost, MIT Press, 2009).
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