Nick Montfort

Last updated
Nick Montfort
Nick Montfort (4631588405).jpg
Born
Nicholas Montfort
NationalityAmerican
Known forPoetry, Interactive Fiction, Electronic literature
Notable workThe Future, #!, Grand Text Auto, Twisty Little Passages, The Electronic Literature Collection: Volume 1, The New Media Reader

Nick Montfort is a poet and professor of digital media at MIT, where he directs a lab called The Trope Tank. [1] He also holds a part-time position at the University of Bergen [2] where he leads a node on computational narrative systems at the Center for Digital Narrative. [3] Among his publications are seven books of computer-generated literature and six books from the MIT Press, several of which are collaborations. His work also includes digital projects, many of them in the form of short programs. [4] He lives in New York City. [5]

Contents

Computer-generated books

Montfort's The Truelist (Counterpath, 2017) is a computer-generated book-length poem produced by a one-page computer program. The code is included at the end of the book. [6] Montfort has also done a complete studio recording reading The Truelist, available at PennSound. [7]

Among Montfort's computer-generated books is #! (pronounced "shebang"), in which he "chooses the programming languages Python, Ruby, and Perl (the last of which has a documented history as a poetic medium) to create impressions of an ideal—machines based on the rules of language." [8] The book includes a Python version of "Taroko Gorge," which is available online in JavaScript and has been modified by many authors. [9] [10] Some of these "remixes" are collected in The Electronic Literature Collection: Volume 3. [11]

Montfort collaborated with six others on 2x6, a book published by Les Figues that includes six short programs and some of the short narrative poems these generate in English, Spanish, French, Polish, Japanese, and Russian. This project has also been exhibited and is available online on the Web. Montfort's Autopia, which assembles short sentences from the names of automobiles, is another project that also appears as a printed book (published by Troll Thread), a gallery installation, and a web page. These and other of his computer-generated books have been considered conceptual writing. [12]

Several of Montfort's printed computer-generated books were generated with programs he wrote during National Novel Generation Month (NaNoGenMo). These include three self-published books, Hard West Turn (2018 Edition), Megawatt, and World Clock, written during the first NaNoGenMo in 2014. [13] [14] Translations of two of these were published by presses in Europe: World Clock was published in Polish translation by ha!art, and Megawatt in German translation by Frohmann.

Montfort is the founder and series editor of Using Electricity, a series of computer-generated books published by Counterpath.

In November 2019 Montfort announced "Nano-NaNoGenMo," calling for short computer programs within that year's National Novel Generation Month. His request was that people write programs of 256 characters or less to generate novels of 50,000 words or more. He contributed several such programs himself, as did several others. [14] [15]

Poetry

Montfort's poetry, in addition to computer-generated books and projects, includes digital poems that are collaborations with others. He, Amaranth Borsuk and Jesper Juul wrote The Deletionist, a system for generating erasure poetry from any page on the web. With Stephanie Strickland he wrote Sea and Spar Between, a generator of about 225 trillion stanzas arranged in a grid and combining language from Herman Melville's Moby Dick and Emily Dickinson's poems. [16] [17] Montfort and William Gillespie wrote 2002: A Palindrome Story, a 2002-word narrative palindrome published in 2002 in print and on the web. [18]

Riddle & Bind (Spineless Books, 2010), Montfort's first book of poetry, is a collection of poems written under constraint and literary riddles.

Interactive fiction

Montfort has written about interactive fiction and written several interactive fiction games. Book and Volume (2005) was a finalist in the 2007 Slamdance Guerilla Gamemaker Competition. However, after Super Columbine Massacre RPG! , which had also been named a finalist, was excluded from the festival, Montfort withdrew from the competition in protest.

Released in 2000, [19] Ad Verbum is a wordplay-based game in which the player has to figure out stylistic constraints in different locations and type certain commands in order to solve puzzles. [20] It received the 2000 XYZZY Award for Best Puzzles. [21]

Twisty Little Passages: An Approach to Interactive Fiction, a 2003 book, was described by Steve Meretzky as "a thoroughly researched history of interactive fiction, as well as a brilliant analysis of the genre." [22]

Writing on digital media

The group blog Grand Text Auto, active in the early 2000s, was one site where Montfort wrote with others about digital media. Montfort wrote Twisty Little Passages: An Approach to Interactive Fiction (MIT Press, 2003) and co-edited The Electronic Literature Collection: Volume 1 (ELO, 2006) and The New Media Reader (MIT Press, 2003) [23] during that time.

Montfort and Georgia Institute of Technology professor Ian Bogost wrote Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System (MIT Press, 2009), a study of world's first widespread gaming system, the Atari 2600. Racing the Beam. In the book, they analyze the platforms, or systems, that underlie the computing process. They also discuss the social and cultural implications of the system that dominated the video game market. [24] In 2012 he and nine co-authors published a book about a one-liner program for the Commodore 64.

His most recent book is The Future (MIT Press, 2017). A futures studies reviewer describes The Future as "written by an outsider to the foresight community" who "examines the works of artists, inventors, and designers and how they have imagined the future." [25] The book was reviewed as "striking a balance between planning and poetry ... a sober, tight account of what 'the future' is and has been, as well as how to think and make it." [26]

Works

Poetry

Prose

In print

Related Research Articles

Interactive fiction (IF) is software simulating environments in which players use text commands to control characters and influence the environment. Works in this form can be understood as literary narratives, either in the form of Interactive narratives or Interactive narrations. These works can also be understood as a form of video game, either in the form of an adventure game or role-playing game. In common usage, the term refers to text adventures, a type of adventure game where the entire interface can be "text-only", however, graphical text adventure games, where the text is accompanied by graphics still fall under the text adventure category if the main way to interact with the game is by typing text. Some users of the term distinguish between interactive fiction, known as "Puzzle-free", that focuses on narrative, and "text adventures" that focus on puzzles.

<i>Colossal Cave Adventure</i> 1976 video game

Colossal Cave Adventure is a text-based adventure game, released in 1976 by developer Will Crowther for the PDP-10 mainframe computer. It was expanded upon in 1977 by Don Woods. In the game, the player explores a cave system rumored to be filled with treasure and gold. The game is composed of dozens of locations, and the player moves between these locations and interacts with objects in them by typing one- or two-word commands which are interpreted by the game's natural language input system. The program acts as a narrator, describing the player's location and the results of the player's attempted actions. It is the first well-known example of interactive fiction, as well as the first well-known adventure game, for which it was also the namesake.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">William Crowther (programmer)</span> Computer programmer and caver (born 1936)

William Crowther is an American computer programmer, caver, and rock climber. He is the co-creator of Colossal Cave Adventure from 1975 onward, a seminal computer game that influenced the first decade of video game design and inspired the text adventure game genre.

Patricia ("Pat") P. Crowther, later known as Patricia P. Wilcox, is an American cave explorer and cave surveyor active in the 1960s and early 1970s. She also worked as a computer programmer.

Digital poetry is a form of electronic literature, displaying a wide range of approaches to poetry, with a prominent and crucial use of computers. Digital poetry can be available in form of CD-ROM, DVD, as installations in art galleries, in certain cases also recorded as digital video or films, as digital holograms, on the World Wide Web or Internet, and as mobile phone apps.

<i>Combat</i> (video game) 1977 video game

Combat is a 1977 video game by Atari, Inc. for the Atari Video Computer System. In the game, two players controlling either a tank, a biplane, or a jet fire missiles at each other for two minutes and sixteen seconds. Points are scored by hitting the opponent, and the player with more points when the time runs out wins. Variations on the gameplay introduce elements such as invisible vehicles, missiles that ricochet off of walls, and different playing fields.

<i>Curses</i> (video game) 1993 video game

Curses is an interactive fiction computer game created by Graham Nelson in 1993. Appearing in the beginning of the non-commercial era of interactive fiction, it is considered one of the milestones of the genre.

Electronic literature or digital literature is a genre of literature where digital capabilities such as interactivity, multimodality or algorithmic text generation are used aesthetically. Works of electronic literature are usually intended to be read on digital devices, such as computers, tablets, and mobile phones. They cannot be easily printed, or cannot be printed at all, because elements crucial to the work cannot be carried over onto a printed version.

<i>ifMUD</i> 1997 video game

ifMUD is a MUD associated with the rec.arts.int-fiction newsgroup accessible via telnet or a MUD client. It is central to the interactive fiction community, frequented by many of the genre's best-known writers. Every year, the XYZZY Awards are hosted on ifMUD during an online ceremony.

<i>Pac-Man</i> (Atari 2600 video game) Atari 2600 version of Pac-Man

Pac-Man is a 1982 maze video game developed and published by Atari, Inc. under official license by Namco, and an adaptation of the 1980 arcade game Pac-Man. The player controls the title character, who attempts to consume all of the wafers in a maze while avoiding four ghosts that pursue him. Eating flashing wafers at the corners of the screen causes the ghosts to temporarily turn blue and flee, allowing Pac-Man to eat them for bonus points. Once eaten, a ghost is reduced to a pair of eyes, which return to the center of the maze to be restored.

<i>The Count</i> (video game) 1979 video game

The Count is a text adventure written by Scott Adams and published by Adventure International in 1979. The player character has been sent to defeat the vampire Count Dracula by the local Transylvanian villagers, and must obtain and use items from around the vampire's castle in order to defeat him.

A Change in the Weather is a 1995 interactive fiction (IF) video game.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ian Bogost</span> American philosopher

Ian Bogost is an American academic and video game designer, most known for the game Cow Clicker. He holds a joint professorship at Washington University as director and professor of the Film and Media Studies program in Arts & Sciences and the McKelvey School of Engineering. He previously held a joint professorship in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication and in Interactive Computing in the College of Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where he was the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts Distinguished Chair in Media Studies.

Software studies is an emerging interdisciplinary research field, which studies software systems and their social and cultural effects. The implementation and use of software has been studied in recent fields such as cyberculture, Internet studies, new media studies, and digital culture, yet prior to software studies, software was rarely ever addressed as a distinct object of study. To study software as an artifact, software studies draws upon methods and theory from the digital humanities and from computational perspectives on software. Methodologically, software studies usually differs from the approaches of computer science and software engineering, which concern themselves primarily with software in information theory and in practical application; however, these fields all share an emphasis on computer literacy, particularly in the areas of programming and source code. This emphasis on analysing software sources and processes often distinguishes software studies from new media studies, which is usually restricted to discussions of interfaces and observable effects.

Critical code studies (CCS) is an emerging academic subfield, related to software studies, digital humanities, cultural studies, computer science, human–computer interface, and the do-it-yourself maker culture. Its primary focus is on the cultural significance of computer code, without excluding or focusing solely upon the code's functional purpose. According to Mark C. Marino, it

is an approach that applies critical hermeneutics to the interpretation of computer code, program architecture, and documentation within a socio-historical context. CCS holds that lines of code are not value-neutral and can be analyzed using the theoretical approaches applied to other semiotic systems in addition to particular interpretive methods developed particularly for the discussions of programs.

Robert W. Lafore is a computer programmer, systems analyst and entrepreneur. He coined the term "interactive fiction", and was an early software developer in this field.

Judith Pintar is a sociologist and author of interactive fiction. She is also a Celtic harp player and a composer of instrumental music.

Amaranth Borsuk is an American poet and educator known for her experiments with textual materiality and digital poetry. She is currently an associate professor at the University of Washington Bothell's School of Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences, where she teaches undergraduate courses on poetry, philology, and experimental writing. She also serves as the Chair of the school's M.F.A. program in Creative Writing, which she co-chaired from 2018 to 2022.

John Howland Cayley is a Canadian pioneer of writing in digital media as well as a theorist of the practice, a poet, and a Professor of Literary Arts at Brown University.

References

  1. ↑ Rettberg, Scott (2019-01-09). Electronic literature. Cambridge, UK. ISBN   978-1-5095-1677-3. OCLC   1028213515.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
  2. ↑ "Nick Montfort, MIT Professor of Digital Media, Appointed Professor II at UiB Digital Culture". University of Bergen. Retrieved 2022-10-12.
  3. ↑ "Partners and people at the Center for Digital Narrative". University of Bergen. Retrieved 2022-10-12.
  4. ↑ "Nick Montfort". Poetry Foundation. 2019-11-26. Retrieved 2019-11-26.
  5. ↑ "Nick Montfort, UHV American Book Review Reading Series Speaker". The Victoria Advocate. Retrieved 2019-11-26.
  6. ↑ Miller, Arthur I. (October 2019). The artist in the machine : the world of AI powered creativity. Cambridge, Massachusetts. ISBN   978-0-262-04285-7. OCLC   1080249147.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
  7. ↑ "PennSound: Nick Montfort". writing.upenn.edu. Retrieved 2019-11-26.
  8. ↑ "Book Review: #! | The Found Poetry Review". www.foundpoetryreview.com. Retrieved 2018-07-21.
  9. ↑ "Taroko Gorge and Its Remixes". I ♥ E-Poetry. 2013-11-15. Retrieved 2018-07-21.
  10. ↑ Marques da Silva, Ana; Bettencourt, Sandra (2017-04-18). "Writing–reading devices: intermediations". Neohelicon. 44 (1): 41–54. doi:10.1007/s11059-017-0382-0. hdl: 10316/108485 . ISSN   0324-4652. S2CID   151394868.
  11. ↑ "Electronic Literature Collection - Volume 3". collection.eliterature.org. Retrieved 2018-07-21.
  12. ↑ ZELTIL, YIGRU. (2017). BIBLIOGRAPHY OF CONCEPTUAL WRITING. [Place of publication not identified]: LULU COM. ISBN   978-1-365-72551-7. OCLC   990024566.
  13. ↑ Dzieza, Josh (2014-11-25). "The strange world of computer-generated novels". The Verge. Retrieved 2019-11-26.
  14. 1 2 "Text-Savvy AI Is Here to Write Fiction". Wired. ISSN   1059-1028 . Retrieved 2019-11-26.
  15. ↑ GitHub - NaNoGenMo/2019: National Novel Generation Month, 2019 edition, National Novel Generation Month, 2019-11-26, retrieved 2019-11-26
  16. ↑ Marczewska, Kaja (2018-02-22). This is not a copy : writing at the iterative turn. New York. ISBN   978-1-5013-3783-3. OCLC   987796925.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
  17. ↑ Johnston, David Jhave (2016). Aesthetic animism : digital poetry's ontological implications. Cambridge, Massachusetts. ISBN   978-0-262-33439-6. OCLC   951678436.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
  18. ↑ Stefans, Brian Kim (2015). Word toys poetry and technics. Project Muse., Project MUSE. Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press. ISBN   978-0-8173-9122-5. OCLC   993608334.
  19. ↑ Geyh, Paula (April 24, 2017). The Cambridge Companion to Postmodern American Fiction. Cambridge University Press. p. 184. ISBN   9781107103443.
  20. ↑ Bray, Joe; Gibbons, Alison; McHale, Brian (July 26, 2012). The Routledge Companion to Experimental Literature. Routledge. p. 464. ISBN   9781136301742.
  21. ↑ Electronic Art and Animation Catalog. Association for Computing Machinery. 2001. p. 102.
  22. ↑ Twisty Little Passages. MIT Press. 7 November 2003. ISBN   9780262134361 . Retrieved 2018-07-21.{{cite book}}: |website= ignored (help)
  23. ↑ "Nick Montfort". Poetry Foundation. Poetry Foundation. 2018-07-21. Retrieved 2018-07-21.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: others (link)
  24. ↑ Edgers, Geoff (March 8, 2009). "A talk with Nick Montfort". The Boston Globe.
  25. ↑ "Book Review: The Future | AAI Foresight". aaiforesight.com. Retrieved 2018-07-21.
  26. ↑ "A Review of The Future". ADJACENT Issue 3. 2018-06-05. Retrieved 2018-07-21.
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