Recover.exe is a Singulars performance held at Casa dos Livros in Porto for Breaking the Code, a strand of the FLUP conference gathered under the theme Error 403: Critical Refusals. A fine-tuned model and I write on the same prompts in front of the room, and the audience votes for the poem that moves them most. The bookshop hosts the duel online, so the ballots arrive from across the room and across the wire at once.
The title takes 403 seriously. A refusal is not a dead end but a door held shut on purpose, and recovery is what the poem does after the machine declines to answer plainly. The human and the model trade lines about loss, repair, and the stubborn work of writing back from an error. Whoever the room chooses feeds the next round: the winning voice becomes the seed the other one has to survive.
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.
