Mac Low: Jackson Mac Low viewed poetry not (only) as a mode of self-expression but also as a series of instructions that could lead to an unpredictable eventuality. In The Pronouns, Mac Low created a collection of instruction poems through a series of nested chance procedures and free choice, using both aleatoric and randomizing influences to arrive at a group of poems that act as scores for performance. In later experiments with computing he found ways to automate this type of work. In 2012 and again in 2020 I created performances using the poems from The Pronouns that demonstrated the complex web of relationships that I lived within–inherited relationships bleeding into current social worlds. This paper will consider the ways Mac Low’s randomized language forms allow for performances that engender alliances by requiring group problem-solving and intensive collaboration, catapulting the interpreter into a space of play and imagination.
Miller: Mac Low’s performance work The Marrying Maiden was written in 1960 and performed 47 times by The Living Theatre, with a musical score by John Cage. The play combines a series of determinate elements and sequences that Mac Low generated using chance operations. The text’s performative realization, however, while imposing a certain scripted discipline on the performers, was “completely indeterminate” in “the action of the play and its total performance time.” This paper will explore the interaction of determining procedure and indeterminate performance in constituting dramatic personae (“characters”) that model subjects in theatre, yet analogous to everyday subjects at the intersection of structured information flows and free choices. Through this textual and performative experimentalism, Mac Low thus suggests his own anarchist-pacifist concept of “freedom” divergent from both liberal and proto-New Left Marxist notions.
O’Driscoll: In a 2001 reading Mac Low told his audience that he would “read pretty slowly, in order to deal with the echo from side to side.” A recording of the event that evening captures a performance that is markedly plodding and patient, the words reverberating in their demarcation of the performance space, resonant in their echolocation of the poet’s embodiment. Mac Low read partly from the Stein Poems, a series of 161 poems completed in draft form just six months earlier. The raw material of each poem was generated by a diastic text-selection method through the writings of Gertrude Stein. The process requires that words be drawn sequentially from the source text in accordance with their algorithmic correspondence with a seed text. This paper looks at Mac Low’s audio-textual performance that evening—his last recorded public reading of the Steins—as an assertion of material, human, creative engagement with digital technologies, a critical presaging, of sorts, of the algorithmically-driven creations of generative AI.
Watten: This essay cites two popular models for reading machine-generated texts: first, the Voight-Kampff Test in Blade Runner (1982), where human or nonhuman meaning is based on “100 questions, cross-referenced,” an algorithmic model. In Blade Runner 2049 (2017), the protagonist K, a replicant, submits to a “Baseline Test” made of preexisting poetic vocabulary. The words are no longer “indexed, cross-referenced” but simply surface words used as prompts. Two theories of reading are implied in these examples. Expanding on their implications for current discussions of close, surface, and distant reading (in theorists Guillory, Best and Marcus, Hayles), I will take up the machinic composition of Jackson Mac Low’s The Stein Poems (2025), which uses “poetic vocabulary” drawn from Stein’s mid-period, language-centered work, through theories of reading. What are the “politics of reading” in using an arbitrary, contextless word source, on the one hand, and Gertrude Stein’s mid-period nonreferential writing, on the other?