Inspired by a visit to Taroko Gorge in Taiwan, Nick Montfort's modest, procedurally-generated poem has produced an entire subgenre of remixes, remakes, constrained writing experiments, and parodies. The original Taroko Gorge brings together the enormous scale and diversity of geological space with the recombinatorial potential of computation. In the same way the shrinking position of human subjectivity is depicted in Romantic painting, the reader encounters their deeply attenuated subject position when confronted with the depiction of a vast procedural landscape recombining a small set of textual elements into an infinite scrolling text (as is typical of Montfort’s poetic practice.) And in the same way that every leaf is distinct and you can never step into the same river twice, each stanza is unique (or at least the number of finite possibilities far exceed the lifespan of a single reader). Nevertheless, after a sustained reading of multiple stanzas, the poem's constrained lexical system emerges. The versatility of its system would serve as the seed for a new poetic form.

The appeal of Taroko Gorge is not simply what vertically scrolls across the screen, but the code itself. The poem's HTML excess is governed by an algorithmically minimal JavaScript program: the source code contains less than a thousand words. This economic simplicity is perhaps why Taroko Gorge’s poetic boundlessness is not simply restricted to the output of a browser. Countless readers of Taroko Gorge have been inspired to borrow Montfort’s source code and substitute the content of the arrays with their own remixes, reflections, and responses to the original code. Beyond the minimalist elegance of the poem itself, this larger phenomenon of appropriation and remix is what the ELC sought to preserve. Taroko Gorge transformed from procedurally-generated poem into an ever-expanding platform for poetic play.