Nick Montfort

Nick Montfort
Associate Professor of Digital Media
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Thursday, February 7, 2013
5:00 pm
Taylor Hall, Room 203

Creative Computing and Literary Code

“Creative computing” is a concept that incorporates but goes beyond video games, including hobbyist programming, the work of the demoscene, digital art, and electronic literature. This talk will sketch the space of creative computing and will show some ways that people (whether or not they identify as “programmers”) can use computation to produce conceptual, expressive, aesthetic, and imaginative output. After showing what has been done in creative computing at a high level, this talk will consider two very concise programs, about one line long, that offer an entry point for artists, writers, and humanists. Montfort’s creative work and historical examples of short programs will be shown.

Nick Montfort writes computational and constrained poetry, develops computer games, and is a critic, theorist, and scholar of computational art and media. He is associate professor of digital media in the Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and is now serving as president of the Electronic Literature Organization. He earned a Ph.D. in computer and information science from the University of Pennsylvania.

Montfort’s digital media writing projects include the interactive fiction system Curveship; the ppg256 series of 256-character poetry generators; the group blog Grand Text Auto; Ream, a 500-page poem written on one day; Mystery House Taken Over, a collaborative “occupation” of a classic game; Implementation, a novel on stickers written with Scott Rettberg; and several works of interac- tive fiction: Winchester’s Nightmare, Ad Verbum, and Book and Volume.

Sponsored by the Media Studies Program, English Department and Computer Science Department.

Individuals with disabilities requiring accommodations or information on accessibility should contact the Campus Activities Office, 845 437-5370.