Nick Montfort

associate professor, digital media, MIT

A critic, theorist and scholar of computational art and media, Nick Montfort is associate professor of digital media in the Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he writes computational and constrained poetry and develops computer games. He holds a Ph.D. in computer and information science from the University of Pennsylvania. Montfort's digital media writing projects include the group blog *Grand Text Auto*, the ppg256 series of 256-character poetry generators; *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 interactive fiction including *Book and Volume*, *Ad Verbum*, and *Winchester's Nightmare*. Montfort, along with Ian Bogost, wrote *Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System*, published by MIT Press in 2009, which was the first book in the Platform Studies series. He has also written *Twisty Little Passages: An Approach to Interactive Fiction* and, with William Gillespie, *2002: A Palindrome Story*, which the Oulipo acknowledged as the world's longest literary palindrome. He edited *The Electronic Literature Collection Volume 1* and *The New Media Reader*. His current work is on narrative variation in interactive fiction and the role of platforms in creative computing.