The Upgrade! w/Nick Montfort, Thurs, Dec 8 at Eyebeam

Dear all,

Please join us on Thursday, December 8, for a talk with poet, writer and programmer Nick Montfort. We'll celebrate the launch of his new work Book and Volume, and close 2005.

The talk will take place in Liz's classroom at Eyebeam. Book and Volume will be installed on computers around us. To warm things up, shall we have us a potluck? Wine, beer (whiskey's okay too) and snacks are welcomed.

Nick will first discuss the approach that his collaborators and him have taken in working together on projects including 2002: A Palindrome Story (with William Gillespie) and Implementation (with Scott Rettberg). Nick is most interested in collaborations that involve developing the central concept and structures of a piece together, and that don't involve parceling out different creative tasks to different collaborators. Then, he'll consider his work in interactive fiction, and particularly his just-released interactive fiction Book and Volume, as an attempt to bring the computer's capabilities into literary art, another essential aspect of his practice.

Nick Montfort is a poet, writer, and programmer who lives in Philadelphia. His projects include Book and Volume (an interactive fiction, Auto Mata, 2005), Mystery House Taken Over (a modification kit and several modified interactive fictions, with Emily Short, Dan Shiovitz, and others, Turbulence, 2005), Implementation (a novel on stickers, written with Scott Rettberg, 2004), and 2002: A Palindrome Story (written with William Gillespie, online and in print from Spineless Books, 2002). He wrote Twisty Little Passages: An Approach to Interactive Fiction (MIT Press, 2003), and, with Noah Wardrip-Fruin, edited the book and CD-ROM The New Media Reader (MIT Press, 2003). Nick is a Ph.D. candidate in computer and information science at the University of Pennsylvania. He blogs at Grand Text Auto ; his own site can be found at http://nickm.com.

When/Where:
Eyebeam
Thursday, December 8, 7:30 PM
540-548 west 21st street (bet 10 & 11 Ave)

The Upgrade! is an international network of gatherings concerning art + tech + community (http://www.theupgrade.net).