Samuel Beckett

Megawatt is based on passages from Samuel Beckett’s novel Watt, first published in 1953 but written much earlier, when Beckett was aiding the French Resistance during World War II. The novel Megawatt leaves aside all of the more intelligible language of Beckett’s novel and is based, instead, on that which is most systematic and inscrutable. It does not just recreate these passages, although with minor changes the Megawatt code can be used to do so. In the new novel, rather, they are intensified by generating, using the same methods that Beckett used, significantly more text than is found in the already excessive Watt. The novel concludes with a listing of the code that was used to generate it.

(Source: Harvard Book Store)

A single-loading VIC-20 demo (3583 bytes) presented on November 30, 2013 at Récursion in Montréal. Nanowatt is a 3.5 KB assembly-language program for a 1981 computer that can display only 22 characters on a line. This demo was completed and first shown publicly at Récursion, a demoparty in Montréal, on November 30, 2013. Montfort developed the concept and programmed the demo working with French and Beckett expert Patsy Baudoin and with Michael Martin, who wrote the music and programmed the music system, Soundnaif. Nanowatt is not simply inspired by Samuel Beckett’s second novel, Watt; it, like Jorge Luis Borges’s famous author Pierre Menard, produces a long passage from Watt (and from the French translation of Watt) verbatim. (Source: Author's description)