For this review I looked at "poem.exe" by Liam Cooke from the "Bots" section of the Electronic Literature Collection website (Page 3). This bot produces short, 3-4 line, haiku-like poems constructed from 3-4 random lines taken from a haiku database. (According to the Electronic Literature Collection site, the process utilized was inspired by Raymond Queneau's A Hundred Thousand Billion Poems. The bot's resulting poems are then posted to Twitter every two hours. Despite the intended randomness of the creation/construction process, the poems that emerge are, for the most part, surprisingly coherent and often struck me as being quite beautiful.

While the final output of the bot could be collected and set down in a traditional medium, the work as a whole can only exist in a digital medium. As a currently running bot, it is constantly creating and "publishing" new content and is thus a dynamic piece of literature. Any attempt to capture this and put it into a print medium would lose the dynamic aspect of the piece and, of course, all subsequent content produced by the bot (literally, in this case, within hours of the attempt to set it down in print due to the bot's two hour post timer).

This dynamic aspect of the bot engages the reader much in the same way that an oral storyteller (or any live performer) engages their audience: that is, the audience must wait on the bot or the performer to present new material for them. If the output of this work appeared only in a traditional print form, the reader could choose to read it in its entirety at any moment. In its current form, however, new content is constantly being introduced for which the reader must wait. In addition, depending on how long the bot is allowed to run, the reader may never encounter a conclusion to the piece whereas traditional print media must always come to an end.