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Ars combinatoria: mystical systems, procedural art, and the computer
Art Journal, Fall, 1997 by Janet Zweig
Throughout his life, Cage wrote texts and gave readings that were developed by chance operations on found texts or recycled bits of his previous writings. For two earlier works, Mureau and Muoyce, he took material from Thoreau and Joyce respectively and reconfigured them into entirely new texts. In 1988, asked to give the six Norton Lectures at Harvard, he created a complex work titled I-VI using several computer programs and massive amounts of found material. Using IC, a computer program by Andrew Culver that simulates I Ching procedure, and Mesolist, another program by Jim Rosenberg that follows rules to place the text in a mesostic form (like an acrostic, but with a center backbone of capital letters that form words when read downward), Cage combined texts from Wittgenstein, Thoreau, Emerson, McLuhan, newspapers, his own writings, and more. At Memorial Hall, Cage read the texts to hypnotic effect. He explained in the introduction to the book of I-VI, "I gave up making choices. In their place, I put the asking of questions. The answers come from the mechanism, not the wisdom, of the I Ching.... Something strikingly like this occurs for each person when he is conceived. The DNA RNA."(30)
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In 1987 Cage made Europeras 1 & 2 for the Frankfurt Opera. Every element of the work was combinatorial. He took two hundred years of European operas and used fragments of them, chosen through computer-generated chance operations. Orchestral musicians could begin their parts anytime within a bracketed period that was shown on a digital display, while the singers chose any arias they preferred. Timing, stage movements, the appearance and removal of scenic flats with cropped images, and lighting were also chance-generated; empty areas of the stage were sometimes illuminated, whereas performers might or might not be lit. Cage took lines from pocket guides to opera plots and computer-mixed them into hilarious melodramatic plots that were then inserted into the playbills; members of the audience got different versions of these plots, none of which referred to events onstage. Though the piece seems to be a conglomeration of parts, it formed a whole. Elsewhere Cage talked about "the togetherness of differences,"(31) as though this work of reconfiguring was a truly synergistic project [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 9 OMITTED].
Finally, the museum exhibition Rolywholyover A Circus was conceived and planned by Cage, though it was presented in several cities posthumously. One of the rooms of the exhibition held artworks on loan from museums all over the world. A computer program specified time brackets within which these artworks were to be moved during viewing hours, and where they were to be placed. Visitors saw a gallery. in constant motion; by the time the installers finished one set of reconfigurations, they could begin on a new one, freshly generated by the computer. The juxtapositions were often surprising, changing the way one read each particular work; and the usually static gallery setting was transformed into a lively performance, like all of Cage's work, in a continual process of generating something else.
