Using Electricity Series

Using Electricity is a series of computer generated books, meant to reward reading in conventional and unconventional ways. The series title takes a line from the computer generated poem “A House of Dust,” developed by Alison Knowles with James Tenney in 1967. This work, a FORTRAN computer program and a significant early generator of poetic text, combines different lines to produce descriptions of houses. The series is edited by Nick Montfort.

Read a review of the series in The Paris Review, here.

Series List
Nick Montfort, The Truelist
Rafael Pérez y Pérez, Mexica: 20 Years—20 Stories [Mexica: 20 años—20 historias]
Allison Parrish, Articulations
Ranjit Bhatnagar, Encomials: Sonnets from Pentametron
Li Zilles, Machine, Unlearning
Milton Läufer, A Noise Such as a Man Might Make
Stephanie Strickland, Ringing the Changes
Jörg Piringer, Data Poetry
Hannes Bajohr, Blanks
Rena Mosteirin, Experiment 116
John Cayley, Image Generation
Arwa Michelle Mboya, Wash Day
Qianxun Chen and Mariana Roa Oliva, Seedlings_: Walk in Time

Nick Montfort is an author or editor of fifteen books, which include books of poetry along with six from the MIT Press, several collaborations, and several artist’s books. Five of his previous books are of computer-generated poetry and include #! (Counterpath, 2014), 2×6 (a multi-lingual collaboration, Les Figues, 2016), and Autopia (Troll Thread, 2016). He is professor of digital media at MIT and lives in New York and Boston.

The series was featured in a special exhibit, Author Function, at the MIT Rotch Library, January 25 to March 21, 2018.