Nick Montfort: Literature and the Computational Arts

Computer-generated poetry has been around for almost 70 years. An important difference now is that many of us are making this work central to our practice, rather than doing isolated experiments here and there. It is typical to locate the practices of computer-generating literature within the category of poetry, imagining that it is best understood as a species of constrained or conceptual (perhaps “uncreative”) writing. I have a different idea. In this talk I will discuss another category of practice I call the computational arts, related to software art and process-intensive digital art. Computational artists use computation as their main medium—usually working with computation in the most flexible and general way, by writing computer programs. I see not the literary arts, but the computational arts (spanning visual, sound, literary, and other work) as most fundamental to computer-generated poetry.

Prof. Dr. Nick Montfort is a poet and professor of digital media at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).