Return to the Gorge

It was in 2009, during a trip to Taiwan, that Nick Montfort ‘wrote’ a poem about the distinctive landscape of the Liwu River and its surrounding gorge. Perhaps unconsciously he was donning the robes of one of the many Chinese 13th century scholar-poets commemorating a piece of natural beauty, but instead of using calligraphy he composed his work with code. What he couldn’t have predicted was how this small code/poem would be capable of spawning so many variations by so many poets.

This presentation looks back to the original conditions for the creation of Taroko Gorge (https://nickm.com/taroko_gorge/) and how its formal constraints and subsequent reception were able to provoke and inspire its multiple remixes.