Black Box Syndrome

"Black Box Syndrome is a series of poems (or "black boxes") based on the hexagrams in the I Ching. Following the aleatoric tradition popularized by the surrealists and extended by the work of John Cage and Jackson Maclow, the poems cast their assorted lenses (or coins, or yarrow stalks) at the hazards of the incessant financialization of everyday life. Synthesizing chance-operational aesthetics with Aztec anatomical science, conspiracy theory with systems theory, and the black box model with the concept of the "influencing machine," Black Box Syndrome articulates the tension between lyric excess and digital compaction that encodes poetic discourse in the age of pandemic. Over and against the corrosive world-shrinking effects of Wall Street risk management and futures trading, the black boxes in this book propose a counter-divination that distorts, deranges, and decolonizes the logic of empire"--