Description:

The English Department presents a lecture by Nick Montfort, Professor of Digital Media at MIT, titled " Poetry Generated by Computer Programs"

Monday, December 5 at 5:00 PM in University Hall 201.

Prof. Nick Montfort develops computational art and poetry, often collaboratively. He is a professor at MIT and is the principal of the naming firm Nomnym. He lives in New York and Boston.

Montfort earned a Ph.D. in computer and information science from the University of Pennsylvania, a Masters in creative writing (poetry) from Boston University, a Masters in media arts and sciences from MIT, and undergraduate degrees in liberal arts and computer science from the University of Texas.

Projects of Montfort’s include several very small-scale poetry generators such as the ones in the ppg256 series and Concrete Perl; the group blog Grand Text Auto; Ream, a 500-page poem written in one day; Mystery House Taken Over, a collaborative “occupation” of a classic game; Implementation, a co-written novel on stickers documented in a book; the interactive fictions Winchester’s Nightmare, Ad Verbum, and Book and Volume; and several other work of digital poetry and art, including the collaborations Sea and Spar Between (with Stephanie Strickland) and The Deletionist (with Amaranth Borsuk and Jesper Juul).

Montfort works in several different contexts, which include the Web, book publication, and the literary reading but also the demoscene (e.g., the collaboration Nanowatt, shown at Récursion in Montréal) and gallery exhibition (e.g, From the Tables of My Memorie, exhibited in Boston and Singapore and the collaborative Boston exhibit Programs at an Exhibition). He translates computational art and writing and organizing the translation project Renderings; his own work has been translated into half a dozen languages. For instance, his free-software computer-generated novel World Clock was translated to Polish and published in ha!art’s Liberatura series, which also includes Finnegans Wake. Many of Montfort’s works have also been modified and transformed by others to become the basis for new work; his short generator Taroko Gorge has been the basis for more than two dozen published remixes.