Michael Murtaugh
Michael Murtaugh (1972, Champaign, Illinois, USA) designs and researches community databases, interactive documentary, and tools for new forms of (collaborative) reading and writing online. He is course director of the Experimental Publishing Master XPUB at the Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam.
Michael Murtaugh is a member of Constant, an art and media collective based in Brussels. With Constant he has been working on Active Archives, a platform for diverse material ranging from texts to images and video. Seeing the project as both technical and cultural, the system facilitates, re-use of material while enriching content through metadata, vocabularies, and taxonomies. He is also a member of the Institute for Computational Vandalism, a collective that works at the intersection of the visual arts archive and new forms of narrative through algorithmic exploration
Murtaugh has a Bachelors degree in Computer Science (1994), and a Masters degree (1996) from the Interactive Cinema group led by Glorianna Davenport, both at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 1997, he moved to the Netherlands and began teaching in the Media Design Master of the Piet Zwart Institute/WDKA in 2003, and the Experimental Publishing Master from its inception in 2016.
His work has been shown at Documenta 13, the Stedelijk Museum, and Kunsthal Aarhus. He is a regular participant in events related to digital archiving and free software and design.
He is based in Brussels. (2022)
Publications
- The Automatist Storytelling System: Putting the Editor's Knowledge in Software, MIT, 1996. Master's thesis.
- "Interaction", in Software Studies: A Lexicon, ed. Matthew Fuller, MIT Press, 2008, pp 143-149.
- "Do (not) Repeat Yourself", in Fun and Software: Exploring Pleasure, Paradox and Pain in Computing, ed. Olga Goriunova, Bloomsbury, 2014.
- "Eleven Orderings", in Report from the Gutenberg Galaxy (Blaker), 1, eds. Karin Nygård and Ellef Prestsæter, Blaker: Rett Kopi, 2015, pp 13-15.
- with Geoff Cox, and Nicolas Malevé, "Archiving the Data-body: Human and Nonhuman Agency in the Documents of Kurenniemi", in Writing and Unwriting (Media) Art History: Erkki Kurenniemi in 2048, eds. Joasia Krysa and Jussi Parikka, MIT Press, 2015.
- with Ellef Prestsæter, Matthew Fuller, Nicolas Malevé, "Vandalist Iconophilia", Concreta 05, Valencia: Concreta, 1 Jun 2015.
- co-editor, The Techno-Galactic Guide to Software Observation, Brussels: Constant, 2018, 244 pp.
- co-editor, Networks Of Ones Own 1: "Etherbox", Brussels: Constant, Sep 2019.
- more
Interviews
- Annet Dekker, "Michael Murtaugh: Portable SKOR", May 2012.
- Shusha Niederberger, "Ecosystems of Writing. Interview with Michael Murtaugh", Jan 2019, 13 min. Video. Transcript. Conducted Sep 2018 at HEK, Zurich. Part of the Creating Commons project. (English)
