Week 2 Bring it to the table

 Chapter 2 of Electronic Literature outlines Combinatory Poetics, which is the oldest genre of digital literature. It stems from several different sources, one of which being the Dada movement (1916), which introduced the idea of "anti-art." The movement embraced randomness in art as opposed to uniformity and beauty. Many writers of the time began to incorporate randomness and recombination into their texts as well. Writers took different texts, words, images, sounds, etc. and combined them to produce a poem or story of sorts, resulting in the genre of Combinatory Poetics. In modern times, Combinatory Poetics is much easier to achieve, as we have electronic systems that can generate random words and sentences, resulting in randomized poetry. Though these poems don't make much sense, and are, as Rettberg described, "absurdist texts." He claims, "As readers we tend to have a desire to make sense of the texts presented to us...engaging our imaginations with prompts to flesh out a richer storyworld than actually denotated by the text that appears on the screen." (pg 42). As a genre of electronic literature, Combinatory Poetics allows us to broaden our idea of what writing is, be more creative in our ways of thinking, and better understand technology and its role as an artistic medium. 

I chose to explore the randomized poetry program Storyland by Nanette Wylde (2002). The reader clicks the "begin" button and the system spits out a slew of random sentences. The sentences make sense, but not in the context of the poem as whole. Wylde claims, "...each sentence is constructed from a pool of possibilities, allowing each reader a unique story." Each poem seems to follow the same structure, as they are all composed of 6 sentences, containing three characters. The first sentence introduces the first character, the third sentence adds the second character, the fifth sentence ties in the 3rd character, and the last sentence details their relation to one another. Though the poem as a whole appears to have the structure of  a normal story, the text does not make sense as a whole, requiring the reader to look deeper for a meaning or to make one up entirely.