Take Gonzo started as a Taroko Gorge remix, and is now the gateway in to an creative exploration through the electronic literature filed.
Take Gonzo includes a morse code which translates into an English sentence.
“Blind Side of a Secret” consists of three audiovisual variations, created individually by Mühlenbruch, Sodeoka, and Nakamura, on words written by Thom Swiss. The work could be considered remix culture in action, overlaying and cutting up an underlying tale—which is never given entirely as a whole, though many sections are held in common—about the unspoken parts of relationships, of coming and going. In all three pieces, alternating third-person voice-over narration by a man and a woman forms the bulk of the audio portion, and it includes parts in English, French, and Dutch. The three collaborators approach the material in sharply contrasting ways: the horizontally scrolling, black-and-red fluidity of Nakamura's animation tells the tale in the most linear fashion, with no interruptions or breaks in the audio and no interaction; Sodeoka takes a DJ's approach, carving up the audio into rhythmic segments and pulsating images that recall song more than narrative; and Mühlenbruch turns it into an interactive flash animation, where an image based on the narrative forms a template that a user can click on to follow the individual narrative threads of the voice-over or run them over each other concurrently. Taken together, and given the absence of the source text in the final presentation, the work suggests that the plethora of angles from which to approach the idea of remix in digital art need not conflict, while at the same time suggesting that nostalgia for an “original work” is perhaps secondary in some respects to the artistic potential of collaboration and redistribution.
(Source: Electronic Literature Directory entry by Rob Schoenbeck)
In 2009 Nick Montfort wrote a short program--first in Python and later in Javascript--that generated an infinite nature poem inspired by the stunning Taroko Gorge in Taiwan. While Montfort never explicitly released the code of “Taroko Gorge” under a free software license, it was readily available to anyone who viewed the HTML source of the poem’s web page. Lean and elegantly coded, with self-evident algorithms and a clearly demarcated word list, “Taroko Gorge” lends itself to reappropriation. Simply altering the word list (the paradigmatic axis) creates an entirely different randomly generated poem, while the underlying sentence structure (the syntagmatic axis) remains the same. Very quickly Scott Rettberg remixed the original poem, replacing its naturalistic vocabulary (“crags,” “basins,” “rocks,” “mist,” and so on) with words drawn from what Rettberg imagined to be a counterpoint to Montfort’s meditative nature scene--a garage in Toyko, cluttered with consumer objects. J.R. Carpenter followed up Rettberg’s “Tokyo Garage” in 2010 with “Gorge,” a remix that relentlessly depicts the act of devouring food, and “Whisper Wire,” a remix that haunts Montfort’s source code with strange sounds, disembodied voices and ghost whispers. In 2011 an uncoordinated series of other remixes of “Taroko Gorge” appeared: J.R. Carpenter’s “Along the Briny Beach”; Talan Memmott’s cynically nostalgic “Toy Garbage”; Eric Snodgrass’s fluxus influenced “Yoko Engorged”; Maria Engberg’s campus parody “Alone Engaged”; Mark Sample’s Star Trek tribute “Takei, George”; Flourish Klink’s erotic fanfic “Fred & George”; and Andrew Plotkin’s meta-remix “Argot Ogre, OK!”Aside from a common DNA in Montfort’s original Javascript code, these remixes share other similarities, such as the title wordplay, often referencing the original title either homonymously or alliteratively; the list of crossed-out names of previous appropriators that appears on the upper right side of the screen; and of course, the dizzying repetition with a difference of a poem that will never stand still nor ever end. Yet despite these similarities, the various remixes are palpably distinct from one another, both stylistically and thematically. This dynamic between appropriation and individuation suggests that there is much to learn from the example of “Taroko Gorge” and its remixes. To this end, this roundtable will bring together many of the authors of the “Taroko Gorge” remixes. While each author will introduce his or her work with a 1-2 minute artist’s statement, the goal of this roundtable is not to dwell on any specific variation, but to discuss the implications of this work upon the broader spheres of text generation, electronic literature, and remix culture. After a series of prompts by the session organizer (Mark Sample), the audience will be invited to join the discussion. Note that two of the participants (Carpenter and Engberg) will be presenting their artist statements via teleconferencing.