The grander “comedy” that frames all of this I call the “comedy of separation,” the basic idea being that language usage has progressed through history from something that we closely associated with the body and “presence” to being largely transferred, even “understood,” by other language, namely code.
Works of electronic literature that play a part in this comedy [of encryption] include those works that involve algorithm to tweak the text without necessarily making it entirely illegible.
These works make no pretense to the lyrical — they are not trying to simulate an “I,” and don’t acknowledge the tradition of literary forms unless it be that particularly 20th-century practice, parataxis (the list) as open-ended form...
The comedy of automation is present in all electronic literature works that dynamically generate “literary” content without the work of a writer...
Ultimately, the challenge in the “comedy of association” is in making sure these links — whether those connecting lexia, as in a classic hypertext, or those embedded in the cut-and-paste techniques of a computer or Flarf poet — are as engaging and precise as those in the original formulation of Lautréamont.
A “duplicate” of a digital original is not a simulacrum or representation of the original but the original itself brought, by magic of transporter beam, into your very computer (though unlike with Kirk, an original is also left behind).
The internet has been characterized by acts of fakery since its inception; in fact, the general tenor of one’s attitude toward information on the web in the 1.0 era was that it was immediately of suspicious character simply by having been posted without the imprimatur of an editor or publisher. Certainly, times have changed...
My tagline for literary works that employ high degrees of recursion, or recursive-like structures, is “how solipsistic?” since my sense is that truly recursive linguistic practice nearly entirely decimates any of the common expressive characteristics of language — there is no possibility of a lyric “I,” no fiction of witness, no documentary content, no pretense to the poem being somehow a charting of the play of the mind (as poets such as Robert Creeley and John Ashbery have described their practice), no politics, etc.
One could say that a recursive poem is pure structure, but that structure would be quite meaningless if the poem did not have some qualities that we associate with normative signification
The ultimate recursive work that I know of is called “2002: A Palindrome Story” by Nick Montfort and William Gillespie.