Nick Montfort, MIT Professor of Digital Media, Appointed Professor II at UiB Digital Culture
We are pleased to announce the appointment of Nick Montfort, Professor of Digital Media at MIT, to a two-year 20% position as Professor II with UiB Digital Culture. Montfort is noted both as a creative author of numerous and varied creative works and as a critic and theorist of digital media.
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Nick Montfort has been appointed as聽Professor II of Digital Culture at the University of Bergen. MIT Professor Nick聽Montfort聽brings more than 20 years of experience as a renowned theorist and electronic literature author to UiB's program in Digital Culture and the Electronic Literature Research Group.聽
Montfort will be joining a group including Professors Jill Walker Rettberg and Scott Rettberg (UiB Digital Culture), Professor Joseph Tabbi (UiB English), Professor Kristine J酶rgensen (UiB Media), among others, in helping to prepare an SFF application for the establishment of聽a Center of Excellence in Digital Narrative, and will teach聽modules in the Digital Culture curriculum聽in courses such as Digital Genres, Electronic Literature, and the graduate seminar in Digital Media Aesthetics, and will join in advising graduate students.
Professor Scott Rettberg commented: "We are overjoyed that Professor Montfort has accepted this appointment. We have had long-standing collaborations with Nick and his lab at MIT, and Nick's appointment really cements a bond between our institutions and our research groups. We're building a kind of dream team for research in Digital Narrative here, and I couldn't imagine a better colleague for that team than Nick Montfort."
Nick Montfort develops computational poetry and art, often collaboratively, and studies creative computing of all sorts.聽
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鈥檚 include several very small-scale poetry generators such as the ones in the聽辫辫驳256听蝉别谤颈别蝉, the four in聽Concrete Perl,聽and more than two dozen BASIC and assembly language Commodore 64 programs. He was part of the group blog聽Grand Text Auto;听飞谤辞迟别听Ream,聽a 500-page poem, in one day; collaborated with others on聽Mystery House Taken Over,聽an 鈥渙ccupation鈥� of a classic game; co-wrote聽Implementation,聽a novel on mailing labels documented in a book; programmed and wrote the interactive fictions聽Winchester鈥檚 Nightmare, Ad Verbum,听补苍诲听Book and Volume;聽and has developed several other works of digital poetry and art, including the collaborations 鈥淪ea and Spar Between鈥� (with Stephanie Strickland) and聽The Deletionist聽(with Amaranth Borsuk and Jesper Juul).
Montfort works in several different contexts, which include the Web, book publication, and literary reading but also gallery exhibition, the demoscene, and livecoding. He translates computational projects, and his own work has been translated into half a dozen languages. For instance: his free-software computer-generated novel聽World Clock聽was translated to Polish and published in ha!art鈥檚 Liberatura series, which also includes the Polish translation of聽Finnegans Wake;聽his computer-generated novel聽Megawatt聽has been translated to German and published by Frohmann. Many of Montfort鈥檚 works, which are available as free software, have also been modified and transformed by others to become the basis for new work; his short generator 鈥淭aroko Gorge鈥� has been the basis for dozens of published remixes in addition to projects in many classes.
Montfort鈥檚 work has been presented in Australia, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Mexico, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Russia, Singapore, Slovakia, Spain, Taiwan, and the United Kingdom.
With Ian Bogost, Montfort initiated the platform studies approach and the corresponding MIT Press book series. His contributions to critical code studies include organizing and co-authoring the first book using the methods of this field. In electronic literature, he wrote the first book focusing on a single form of e-lit, has extensively created, edited, and written about work of this sort, and served on the board of directors of the Electronic Literature Organization for more than ten years, for three of those as president. He currently edits the Using Electricity series of computer-generated books for Counterpath. Montfort founded and directs The Trope Tank, a DIY research lab/studio, based at MIT and in New York, that undertakes scholarly and aesthetic projects and offers material computing resources. Further underground, he is lead organizer for the demoparty Synchrony and MCs as Doc Mofo.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10,聽(MIT Press, 2013), a 10-author single-voice publication that Montfort organized, focuses on a one-line Commodore 64 BASIC program. He wrote聽Riddle & Bind聽(Spineless Books, 2010), a book of literary riddles and constrained poems. With Ian Bogost, he wrote聽Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System聽(MIT Press, 2009). He wrote聽Twisty Little Passages: An Approach to Interactive Fiction聽(MIT Press, 2003), and, with William Gillespie,聽2002: A Palindrome Story聽(Spineless Books, 2002), which the Oulipo acknowledged as the world鈥檚 longest literary palindrome. He also edited聽The Electronic Literature Collection聽Volume 1 (with N. Katherine Hayles, Stephanie Strickland, and Scott Rettberg, ELO, 2006) and聽The New Media Reader聽(with Noah Wardrip-Fruin, MIT Press, 2003). Montfort鈥檚聽Exploratory Programming for the Arts and Humanities聽(MIT Press, 2016) continues his long-term efforts to teach programming as a method of culturally engaged inquiry and creativity. His book聽The Future聽was published as part of the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series at the end of 2017.
Montfort's recent projects include several computer-generated books that are published in print, in many cases offset printed in a print run from traditional publishers.聽#!聽(Counterpath, 2014; the title is pronounced 鈥渟hebang鈥�) contains programs and poems.聽2脳6聽(Les Figues, 2016), is book of computer-generated poems done in collaboration with six others, in English and five other languages. He has three computer-generated print-on-demand titles, the latest of which is聽Autopia聽(Troll Thread, 2016), along with a print-on-demand book of tiny poems,聽Sliders聽(Bad Quarto, 2017). At the end of 2017 Counterpath published聽The Truelist,聽a computer-generated long poem produced by a single page of Python code without use of any libraries or external data. Montfort鈥檚 studio recording of the entire book-length poem is also freely available on PennSound. Most recently, Montfort has published the 2018 version of聽Hard West Turn聽(Bad Quarto) in a limited edition. This is a computer-generated novel about gun violence in the United States.
