# Insistence, Insisting, Insisted

August 14, 2026 · algorithmic-art, poetry, bookmaking, archiving, theory

Canonical: https://www.romellogoodman.com/writing/insistence-insisting-insisted
Originally published: https://mellogood.substack.com/p/insistence-insisting-insisted

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*Context: A research proposal, drafted for the Beinecke Library [Short-term Research Fellowship](https://beinecke.library.yale.edu/beinecke/researchers/fellowships/short-term). *

For an algorithmic artist, the goal is to create a sequence of steps that takes an input and creates an output. We order and reorder the steps and watch how the system transforms and manipulates each input. Gertrude Stein understood this. In “Portraits and Repetition” she argued that repetition doesn’t exist, only the same phrase returning with shifted emphasis. To Stein meaning is changed as you read the sentence, each word building upon the previous. In her writing, the word is the input and the sentence is the algorithm that transforms it.

Histories of computational art recognize two kinds of pioneers: artists who found artistic uses for computers, like Vera Molnár, and conceptual artists who worked algorithmically without them, like Sol LeWitt. Stein belongs in the second category and remains unclaimed by the field. Reading her works, you can watch the meaning shift as you read each word. She holds a phrase constant and changes one parameter: a pronoun, the sentence around it, the tense. Her writing follows a procedure with the output being the final meaning. The published texts show this finished state then we can study the manuscripts and notebooks to understand how the system evolved. By reading the drafts we can understand how she arrived at the final system and deconstruct her reasoning and process.

### What the drafts hold

In the Beinecke’s archive, I hope to find evidence of the process. The holograph drafts, notebooks, and typescripts in the *Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas Papers* (YCAL MSS 76) are where Stein’s thinking is visible in the notation. The drafts show the system running. What she varied, what she held constant, where a pattern bent mid-composition, what different typescripts regularized or preserved.

The questions I will bring to the reading room are structural. In the portraits, how does a phrase mutate across drafts, what words are substituted, reordered or expanded. In the *Tender Buttons* drafts, what does an input look like, and how consistent is the grammar that transforms it? Is there a pattern that emerges when studying revisions across time as she makes choices towards or away from the final piece. Answering these requires sitting with the physical sequence of drafts.

I have a working precedent for this method. In Flora Figures, a recent artist book, I revisited a single Kazumasa Ogawa photograph and transformed it over and over, deriving algorithms from a historical object rather than generating it. The Stein project extends that approach from image to language, and from reproduction to primary documents.

## What this gives back

This project approaches Stein from practice rather than literary criticism, and its contribution runs in two directions.

For generative art and design, it recovers a pre-computational lineage of rule and iteration as literary craft, executed in longhand. I teach generative systems at the Maryland Institute College of Art and Cooper Union, and this research will feed directly into the classroom. Stein as a primary source for computational thinking without a computer.

For special collections, it models artistic research that treats the archive as source code, studied closely and answered with a finished, published work that carries the Beinecke’s materials to audiences (art book fairs, design classrooms, print collectors) who may never request a manuscript box.

## The output

A published artist chapbook of generative poetry, produced in a numbered edition. In it are compositional systems derived from the techniques uncovered in Stein’s manuscripts. The book will document its own method, recording which rules came from which manuscripts, so that it functions as both artwork and a record of the research. The fellowship will be acknowledged in the book and in all related teaching, lectures, and exhibitions.

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I’m sharing my proposal in the hope that it inspires future projects.

-Mello