Black Box Syndrome

Poems that follow systems of chance and divination to counter corrosive financial systems.

Jose-Luis Moctezuma’s Black Box Syndrome is a series of poems—or “black boxes”—based on black hexagrams in the I Ching, an ancient Chinese divination text. Following the aleatoric tradition popularized by the surrealists and extended by the work of John Cage and Jackson Maclow, these poems cast their lenses on the hazards of the incessant financialization of everyday life. Synthesizing chance-operati...