Nomnym began offering its services in late 2014. Its principal, Nick Montfort, has developed names, some for projects he has been involved in and some for other people’s projects, for about two decades. He is recognized internationally as a poet and as someone who explores language with computation. His naming work has focused on helping nonprofits, socially responsible and community organizations, and/or arts ventures.
Those interested in examples of Montfort’s naming work can examine our list of naming successes, with an emphasis on early work. The development of these names and the discussions that led to success were a major aspect of the establishment of the Nomnym methodology.
Montfort may contract with others as required by the development of each particular proposal. Other members of any Nomnym team must be approved by the client and will respect confidentiality.
Nick Montfort is a poet, and develops literary generators and other computational art and poetry. He is also a scholar of computational art and media, and has undertaken dozens of academic and literary collaborations. He is also a director of the Electronic Literature Organization. He 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’s include the interactive fiction system Curveship and (with international collaborators) the large-scale story generation system Slant; very small-scale poetry generators including the ppg256 series and Concrete Perl; the group blog Grand Text Auto; Ream, a 500-page poem written in one day; Mystery House Taken Over, a collaborative “occupation” of a classic game; Implementation, a co-written novel on stickers documented in a book; the interactive fictions Winchester’s Nightmare, Ad Verbum, and Book and Volume; and several other digital poems and language generators, including the collaborations Sea and Spar Between (with Stephanie Strickland) and The Deletionist (with Amaranth Borsuk and Jesper Juul). He works in several different contexts, which include the Web, book publication, and reading/performance as well as the demoscene (e.g., the collaboration Nanowatt, shown at Récursion in Montréal) and gallery exhibition (e.g, From the Tables of My Memorie, exhibited in Boston and Singapore). He translates computational art and writing; his own work has been translated into half a dozen languages. For instance, his free-software computer-generated novel World Clock was translated to Polish and published in ha!art’s Liberatura series, which also includes Finnegans Wake. Many of Montfort’s works have also been modified and transformed by others; his short generator Taroko Gorge has been the basis for more than two dozen published remixes.
Montfort has helped to establish several new academic fields: Platform studies (he initiated this field and the corresponding MIT Press book series with Ian Bogost), critical code studies (he organized and co-authored the main book using this approach), and 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 has served on the board of directors of the Electronic Literature Organization for more than ten years). He founded and directs The Trope Tank, a DIY and boundary-transgressing MIT research lab that undertakes scholarly and aesthetic projects and offers material computing resources.
Montfort’s computer-generated books of poetry include #! (Counterpath, 2014; the title is pronounced “shebang”), Autopia (Troll Thread, 2016), and The Truelist (Counterpath, 2017). 10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10, (MIT Press, 2013), a 10-author single-voice publication that he organized, focuses on a one-line Commodore 64 BASIC program. He wrote Riddle & Bind (Spineless Books, 2010), a book of literary riddles and constrained poems. With Ian Bogost, he wrote Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System (MIT Press, 2009). He wrote Twisty Little Passages: An Approach to Interactive Fiction (MIT Press, 2003), and, with William Gillespie, 2002: A Palindrome Story (Spineless Books, 2002), which the Oulipo acknowledged as the world’s longest literary palindrome. He also edited The Electronic Literature Collection Volume 1 (with N. Katherine Hayles, Stephanie Strickland, and Scott Rettberg, ELO, 2006) and The New Media Reader (with Noah Wardrip-Fruin, MIT Press, 2003). Montfort recently finished drafting the second edition of Exploratory Programming for the Arts and Humanities (MIT Press, 2016), which continues his long-term project to teach programming as a method of culturally engaged inquiry and making.