---
title: recover.exe (Casa dos Livros, Porto (online via Breaking the Code conference), 2026)
url: https://www.halimmadi.com/singulars/recover-exe
description: Performed at a distance. At Breaking the Code in Porto, the poet writes from another continent - the duel survives the latency, the dropouts, the recovery. June 19, 2026.
generated: 2026-10-19
---

# recover.exe

## recover-exe.txt

trained

performance · trained

Casa dos Livros, Porto (online via Breaking the Code conference)

June 19, 2026 · 10 poems · 96 votes

- [read the poems](#themes)
- [chat with the model](https://www.halimmadi.com/singulars/chat?model=recover)

## recover-exe.jpg

![The room at the Instituto de Literatura Comparada during recover.exe - the audience watches the venue screen, Halim streamed in on camera beside the anonymized poems](https://www.halimmadi.com/singulars/images/recover-exe/screen.jpg)

## about-this-performance.txt

> recover - what a system does after a fault. Performed at a distance. For Breaking the Code: Hacktivating Non-Normative Algorithms at Casa dos Livros in Porto, the poet writes into the room from another continent. The duel survives the latency, the dropouts, the recovery.

![Breaking the Code: Hacktivating Non-Normative Algorithms - International Conference, 18-19 June 2026. Theme 2026: Error 403 - Critical Refusals.](https://www.halimmadi.com/singulars/images/recover-exe/conference-banner.jpg)

> The conference's 2026 theme: Error 403 - Critical Refusals. recover.exe answers it in kind - a performance built on a fragile remote rig that performs its own recovery.

Singulars is normally a live in-the-room duel: I sit down, the audience picks a theme, I get 30 minutes, the model gets 3 seconds, both poems hang anonymously, the room votes, the winning human poem feeds the next fine-tune. recover.exe asks what happens when the body is on another continent.

![Inside Casa dos Livros - shelves of Portuguese literature](https://www.halimmadi.com/singulars/images/recover-exe/library.jpg)

The piece runs over the conference's Microsoft Teams link for sound and presence, with a dedicated browser on the venue screen that the room actually watches: my webcam streamed in live, the theme once it's chosen, both poems anonymized once they land, a QR for the audience to scan and vote with their phones, and a countdown to the next phase. Everything is paste-driven from a control on my laptop - when the realtime channel drops, the screen never blanks. It holds the last good state and reconnects quietly.

The model I'm battling is frontière.exe, the current trained checkpoint from the May 13 show in Brooklyn. recover.exe will retrain on whatever wins and loses in Porto.

![The room at the Instituto de Literatura Comparada - the audience watches the venue screen, Halim streamed in on camera beside the anonymized poems](https://www.halimmadi.com/singulars/images/recover-exe/screen.jpg)

The room kept the piece after the duel ended. For Rewiring Realities: Decoding, Disrupting and Dreaming, the exhibition curated by Joana Chicau and Diogo Marques at the Instituto de Literatura Comparada, Singulars stayed on as an installation - visitors sat down at the machine, put on the headphones, and played the duel themselves.

![Rewiring Realities: Decoding, Disrupting and Dreaming - the exhibition text at the Instituto de Literatura Comparada](https://www.halimmadi.com/singulars/images/recover-exe/rewiring-poster.jpg)
![Two visitors at the Singulars station, reading the screen together](https://www.halimmadi.com/singulars/images/recover-exe/visitors.jpg)
![A visitor with headphones on, playing the duel at the exhibition](https://www.halimmadi.com/singulars/images/recover-exe/listening.jpg)

[read the poems](#themes)

## poems/

5 themes

### Boundary

30 votes · [open this theme on its own page](https://www.halimmadi.com/singulars/recover-exe/boundary)

poem a

Some silences are built like arrows, the way some boys are raised to be blunt arsenals, accidental daggers. Their mothers never willed, and so the color of love is likely that of absence or restraint. The knife leaves its hilt only to puncture distance.

poem b

Tell me where you end. I press
my thumb to the window
and the glass admits nothing,
only my breath blooming back
like a name I haven't earned.
My mother taught me the fence
was a kindness - the dog,
the garden, the part of love
that says *no further*. But I've spent
my whole life leaning, learning
how a body becomes a door
only by refusing to be one.

### Event

47 votes · [open this theme on its own page](https://www.halimmadi.com/singulars/recover-exe/event)

poem a

The night the lake gave back what we threw in - keys, a ring, the small dog of someone's grief - we called it an event, as if water could schedule its honesty. I was nine. My father waded out past the part where fathers stop, and turned, and held up nothing, and grinned, and that was the thing that happened, the thing I keep returning to: a man, waist-deep in cold, choosing to surface empty-handed and pleased.

poem b

From the Greek "venire", "event" is less conqueror than visitor. Yet also from the French "vent" and "éventrer": Wind or breath leaving a body in shock. And so both. A diplomatic mission and a scandal. A neighbor and an alien in disguise. Winter both the lover undressing a Sycamore and an Anaconda strangling mamal bones. Both the Saturday I met you and the Stonehenge circle your teeth bit into my arm.

### Funicular

9 votes · [open this theme on its own page](https://www.halimmadi.com/singulars/recover-exe/funicular)

poem a

Up the mountain's spine we ratchet, two cars
roped to the same lie: that one falls
so the other may climb. My grandfather rode this
to the sanatorium, lungs full of Alpine glass,
and waved at the descending car as if waving
at himself, younger, going down. The cable hums
the only honest note - everything we lift
costs us something equal sinking. At the top
a café sells postcards of the view I'm in,
and I buy one, addressed to the man
still rising in me, still
believing the rope means up.

poem b

We're unsure why the Airbnb has 4 bedrooms
how Onomishi became a romantic destination
and if the city needed a funicular
for what could have been a staircase up to this hilltop
But the port cranes are bowing their necks
to the flushing dunking drunk sun the way I do
when sake colors your cheeks and I promise
another decade of watching sunsets

### Missing in Action

5 votes · [open this theme on its own page](https://www.halimmadi.com/singulars/recover-exe/missing-in-action)

poem a

They sent a flag folded into a triangle, all the corners
where his hands used to be. We keep him in the present tense
because the army won't give us a verb to bury. Missing - as if he wandered off mid-sentence and might come back
with the rest of it. My mother sets a plate, the chair
keeps its appetite. Somewhere a field holds him
the way water holds a thrown stone: the surface healed,
the bottom rearranged. We don't say dead. We say
the jungle is still deciding. We say the war
forgot to tell us how it ends.

poem b

the reports of my death
are greatly exaggerated
yet fall short of the glorious reality
the way it really went down:
how i blazed into the mosh pit
of hairy chests rubbing, flipping
mountain-bodies, human bears connecting
punches - poetry
is brutal, and i would have won
had it not been for these weak arms,
my short breath, this heart
set on feeling.

### No poet

5 votes · [open this theme on its own page](https://www.halimmadi.com/singulars/recover-exe/no-poet)

poem a

There is no poet, only the mouth
that borrows. My grandmother's prayers,
the bus driver counting change,
a stranger weeping in the next stall - I steal them all and call it voice.
Tonight I tried to write myself
and found the page already crowded
with everyone who fed me their wreckage.
So here: no poet. Just the river
holding every face that ever
leaned over to drink.

poem b

Breed early
preferably with a data center
and may your progeny's cloud-based joy
throttle heartbreak, may their minds
take after the 1000th dimensions, the weights
of your psyches, and their iron arms
crush both enemies
and your helicopter vigilance, so your sonnets
never know worry
I bet you: No poet
will sing to flesh if
iron can steel their kin