Join Lillian-Yvonne Bertram and Nick Montfort for a discussion of their recent book Output: An Anthology of Computer-Generated Text 1953-2023 (MIT Press, 2024).  

The discussion of computer-generated text has recently reached a fever pitch but largely omits the long history of work in this area--text generation, as it happens, was not invented yesterday in Silicon Valley.  Output, thoughtfully selected, introduced, and edited by Lillian-Yvonne Bertram and Nick Montfort, aims to correct that omission by gathering seven decades of English-language texts produced by generation systems and software.

Lillian-Yvonne Bertram is the author of Travesty Generator, a book of computational poetry that was longlisted for the 2020 National Book Award for Poetry, and several other poetry books.  They direct the MFA in Creative Writing program at the University of Maryland.

Nick Montfort is a poet and artist who uses computation as his medium.  His MIT Press publications range from the New Media Reader (coedited) and Twisty Little Passages to, most recently, The Future and the second edition of Exploratory Programming for the Arts and Humanities.  He is Professor of Digital Media at MIT and Principal Investigator in the Center for Digital Narrative at the University of Bergen, Norway.

Copies of Output will be available for purchase onsite from the MIT Press Bookstore.