Angie Waller’s Please Wait for the Showdown is part of her Automatic Automatic Writing Sessions series, which, according to its front matter, makes use of “Google Brain.” This refers to Google Translate’s machine learning algorithm, which, as a note explains, is a language model that “is represented in a thousand dimensions—each word is designated by a list of a thousand numbers. The algorithm continues to learn and evolve.”

The session on which this book is based took place between May 13 and 19, 2017, and is subject to a strict constraint: A Japanese character is entered into the translate window, then entered twice (without a space in between) on the line below, and then entered three times (again without spaces) on the line below that, and so on, so that the number of characters always corresponds to the line number—until no more new translation variants are generated by Google Translate. The machine, of course, tries to make sense of this absurd input. “Repeated Japanese phonemes that would sound like ‘uh uh uh’ to the human listener translate into a complex web of words that allude [to] meaning and hint at the poetic” (blurb on artist website), as the very first translation par excellence demonstrates:

The

Meaning

I mean

I mean watching

To say that I mean it

To say it means to call it

To say it means so to speak

It means that it means so called

To say it means so called

It means so to say it means so called

It means so to say it means to call it

To say it means to call it