Chapter 2: Combinatory Poetics

In Chapter 2, "Combinatory Poetics" it's told the combinatory writing has deep connections that interact with writing traditions and art movements which have shaped the 20th century.

First off, I wasn't sure what "combinatory" exactly meant but knowing that it is the combination/arrangement of elements or substances had given me a better understanding of what combinatory poetics could entail. This chapter was meant to show "how elements of chance and procedurality served as the foundation for combinatory and generative art and literature." Dada was a multimedia art movement that seemed to have sparked societies ideas of art during World War l. Its movement had influenced people in surrealist, modernism and conceptual art. Dada had elements such as rejecting dominante modes of distribution, valorization of cultural artifacts, and elevating the audience's peak interest., etc. The concept of a creating a Dadaist poem is actually intriguing and seems to be a good way to make an abstract poem something that could have meaning. It is described on page 23 by Hans Richter that these poems allow for one to take a chance and create innovative forms of the sort.

This also goes hand-in-hand with the concept of digital art as a variable of media. Digital art is a new media that allows for variable nature to be taken advantage of and introduce new elements of indeterminability. Many of the art described in this chapter seem to use different techniques and approaches at digital media but all hold the same variable of digital/e-lit to display their works.
The e-lit of this subject uses an innovative way to regenerate and mutate existing texts by, "define a space of language populated by a number of stanzas comparable to the number of fish in the sea,"(49) This form of mutating texts and has also seemed to change with the development of technology.

At the end of the chapter, Rettberg describes how electronic literature can flow natively from principles of computation. This being said,  many techniques and procedures for producing e-lit equate to "strange, uncanny and beautiful texts from an algorithm of human and machine intelligence," (53).

Cassie Haskell