Plaintext Performance

"At once nearly cloistral in its impersonal sparseness, a black fix-width typeface against a white background, revealing nothing of the author's thoughts or dreams, animated by a nearly-trivial algorithm and on the other hand baroque in the complexity of what is in the text file, ASCII art, various computer outputs, garbled poems, mangled transmissions, and random text/number strings that suggest a deviant psychology, this minimal 'performance' contains just enough life to bring us back to the earliest fascinations with computer sentience. For what little the program throws up against our 'reading,' it is just enough to remind us of the Other that is the computer algorithm." -- from Electronic Literature Collection, Volume 2