Digital poetics and creative computing
Professor Nick Montfort describes his work in digital poetry.
 

 

 


"A term that I really like to describe the field that I'm in and the areas that I research is 'creative computing'", says Nick Montfort, associate professor of Comparative Media Studies at MIT. "That was the name of an old computing magazine at a time when the home computer allowed a lot of people to experiment and find out what the computer could do in terms of creating beauty, joy, entertainment."

Montfort develops computational poetry and art and has participated in dozens of literary and academic collaborations. Recent books include The Future and Exploratory Programming for the Arts and Humanities (MIT Press) and several books of computational poetry: Hard West Turn, The Truelist, #!, the collaboration 2x6, and Autopia. He has worked to contribute to platform studies, critical code studies, and electronic literature.

"I'm a writer and a poet. I create interactive fiction and story generators," says Montfort. "I'm very interested in language and specifically what the computer can do with language. One thing you can do with computers is to create giant systems that embody certain ideas about cognition, narrative, and they're very large-scale, multi-year projects that use the computer to investigate how strories are put together." 

 

Suggested links

Podcast: Exploratory programming for the arts and humanities

The Truelist: a book-length poem generated by code