TAROKO REMIXER

At the Electronic Literature Organization's 2012 panel “Taroko Gorge Remixed: Repetition and Difference in Machine Texts” (West Virginia University, 21 June 2012; transcript of the session audio archived by Christopher T. Funkhouser), Sonny Rae Tempest, speaking “from a non-academic place” and without knowing JavaScript, described using Montfort's poem “as a template”: the code was simple enough that friends could see the input and the output and “go and do this themselves.” That simplicity is one reason a remix lineage grew around Taroko Gorge.

TAROKO REMIXER follows that aspect toward no-code creation. The decisions a remixer once made inside the source file (which words, in which Banks, with what weights, through which line patterns, in what order, under which exceptions) become modules that are configured and wired in the browser. A person can design a working poem-machine, run it, and export it as a standalone HTML work without writing a line of code.

Every programming language is an interface over a more basic one, and no-code carries that track further toward access. Montfort and Bogost's platform studies (Racing the Beam, 2009, and the Platform Studies series) use “platform” for the computing system underneath creative work, whose design shapes what can be made on it. TAROKO REMIXER is a platform in that sense: its design admits one family of works, procedural e-poems built from Banks, Routes, Stanzas and Rules, and an open-ended number of them, each a remix. Fifteen works from the Taroko Gorge lineage, Montfort's original among them, can be opened as editable baselines.