"A Hundred Thousand Billion Poems" by Raymond Queneau

-1961
_"To enjoy A Hundred Thousand Billion Poems and allow this literary work to function as intended, please cut along the lines to allow any of 10 lines to occupy each of the 14 positions in the sonnet. Those too timid to operate on their books may wish to photocopy the pages and cut the photocopies. Cutting out a small gap between each strip will allow the strips to turn and be interchanged most easily."
-"Only a machine can appreciate a sonnet written by another machine."
~Turing

Interesting. Beyond, simply using one or several audience members to complete a work of art, this "poem" requires that the reader actually construct a poem by following simple instructions and operating within boundaries established by the author. In many ways this isn't even literature. It's programming. Or something in between.
Let's consider this "potential literature" in terms of Turing's quote. The reader/writer is asked to interact with this "machine," and then what? Would you consider the poem you chose poetry? Would you consider yourself the author? Or do you simply become a part of the machine?
In the intro, Italo Calvino asserts that the art of it lies in deviation from the systematic process, in the insertion of personal and cultural experience.

There. "Personal and cultural experience." Is this really where the art lies in New Media? What happens when New Media is the vernacular, when emerging technologies are the vernacular? I've been considering the idea of folk (or naive or vernacular) art in a contemporary urban context, and what that might look like in a digital landscape.

How many creative movements have flown by on the world wide web, have been dismissed as stupid graphic trends?

Could Fail Blog be considered a gallery for artists of a VERY specific vernacular?

The computer has become a highly utilitarian and decorative medium. And while there's a lot of digital work out there that is academically informed and conceptually heavy, there's also quite a bit of creative digital work out there made to be used for very specific purposes, even decoration, that does not concern itself with the verbal language of those purposes. Is this the new Metropolitan Folk?