←Home

Return to the Gorge:

trekking along Nick Montfort’s Taroko Gorge 16 years on…

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 and how its formal contraints and subsequent reception were able to provoke and inspire its multiple remixes.

---

Rather Conventional

• The OG — Nick Montfort (2009)
• Author's Statement
• Taroko National Park
• Shanshui Painting
• Shanshui Theory
• Shanshui Projects
• Taroko Gary — Leonardo Flores (2012)
• Mountains and Rivers Without End — Gary Snyder (1996)
• "Streams and Mountains without End." Handscroll, Song Dynasty (1100-1150 CE)
• "Fragments on Ambient Media" — Alec Mapes-Frances (2016)
• "Reading Machines: Ambient Writing and the Poetics of Atmospheric Media" — Alec Mapes-Frances (2017)
• Ambient 4: "On Land" — Brian Eno (1982)
• Optima

Poetix

• "Taroko Gorge Explained"
• Gorge Grammar — Reg Beatty (2025)
• "Generous Poetry Generator" — Mark C. Marino (2014)
• "Generative Code" — Mark C. Marino (2020)
• Why write poems of any sort? — Montfort (2024)
• "The Case for Concise Computational Creativity Systems" — Montfort (2015)
• "XS, S, M, L: Creative Text Generators of Different Scales" — Montfort (2012)
• Computational Poems & Related Digital Projects — Montfort (ongoing)
• "A Platform Poetics" — Montfort (2021)
• Taper: an online literary magazine for small computational pieces

A “Who's Who” of Hypermedia Literature

• Tokyo Garage — Scott Rettberg (2009)
• Rettberg on the making of Tokyo Garage (2012)
• A virtual reading of Tokyo Garage (2009)
• "Taroko Gorge and Its Remixes" — Leonardo Flores (2012)
• "Taroko Gorge Remixed" — Joel Gauthier (translated from the French)
• "Taroko Gorge," and all of its vandals — Montfort (2012)
• A Reply — Judy Malloy (2012)
• Scholars Contemplate the Irish Beer — Judy Malloy (2012)
• "Rejecting the 'Post-web era' while embracing The Future" — Jason McIntosh (2018)

And for something completely different...

• "Curious Gorge: Japan's Idiosyncratic Musical Movement" (2022)
• "The Rocky History of Gorge Music" (2022)

---

Toronto Metropolitan University's Centre for Digital Humanities
rbeatty@torontomu.ca

Background generated from a photograph by Ren Ran on Unsplash.