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 popularised 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 financialisation of everyday life.

Synthesising 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 explores tensions between lyric excess and digital compaction 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 decolonises the logic of empire.