Letters... Some recent emails from participants. Click here.

Plug-in Help This piece uses the Shockwave 8 plug-in. You can download the installer from here. For any problems, trouble-shooting help is available here.

VOICE PIECE FOR SOPRANO

Scream.
   1. against the wind
   2. against the wall
   3. against the sky

1961 autumn


Over a period of 100 days, responses to the above score by Yoko Ono were recorded via the telephone to become part of an online timeline. An inspiring variety of recordings were made, which you can hear by launching the timeline below.

Yoko Ono's work often involves these haiku-like scores that combine imagery, actions and sounds through the imagination, into poetry. By invoking the individual imagination and interpretation of the viewer, a participatory and open-ended process is set in motion.

We wish to thank Yoko Ono for her support and participation in creating this project. We would also like to thank all those that participated, for making this a very fun and rewarding piece.

Click launch below to view/hear the responses.
Open from March 10 -- June 17, 2001.

This online event was held for the duration of the exhibition Y E S  YOKO ONO at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis.

Currently open to participation is "Laugh Piece", a sister project at EGG online. Take a peep and leave your response.

Though privilege afforded some shelter, Yoko Ono was as a child a witness to the devastation and desperation of postwar Japan. Adding to the surreality of childhood was the outsider status, a "butterchild", as she and her brother were called, given the time they had spent growing up in the United States. In these intense times, Yoko and her brother would escape into games of the imagination, such as swapping menus in the sky.

Yoko's Father, descending from a line of samurai-scholars, had wanted to be a concert pianist before becoming a banker. Her mother was also from a wealthy and cultured family, and Yoko was sent to an art school reknown for it's music-centered curriculum. In a typical -- and for Ono prescient -- assignment, pupils were told to listen for and notate everyday sounds and noises.

After studying philosophy at Gakshüin, Ono continued her studies in music, poetry and literature at Sarah Lawrence University in Scarsdale, New York when her family again moved to the United States. From here, Ono was directed by a teacher to the work being done by the avant-garde composers and artists in the city, and became active as an artist, creating works that combined idea, sound and poetry.

One of John Lennon's first encounters with Yoko and her art was at the top of a ladder, peering through a magnifying glass to try and read the tiny word hanging on a clear plate above it. The word, and the work, was YES (1966) in her 1966 exhibition at Indica Gallery in London. Painting to Hammer a Nail (1966) posed a different interaction. Asked by the visitor if it was indeed alright to hammer a nail into the painting, Yoko told him it was five shillings to do so. Lennon made a counter-offer to pay her an imaginary 5 shillings to hammer in an imaginary nail, and, as Ono wrote, "so I met a guy who plays the same game I played."

From here began a powerful fusion that created an aesthetic of radical political activism, committed to using their celebrity as a productive and positive tool for social change. Together they tackled the politics of sex and the body through to the politics of war, all as proponents for the transformative power of love.

A complex status as an outsider as well as a consummate inside player, has contributed to a widely disparate and distorted view of the artist. John Lennon once remarked that Yoko Ono was the world's "most famous unknown artist. Everybody knows her name, but nobody knows what she does." Forty years later, the importance of Yoko's artworks is only now being re-examined and rediscovered.

In the late 1940s, Cage became deeply influenced by Zen Buddhism, studying with Daisetz Suzuki, who also introduced Zen to Beat poets such as Allen Ginsberg. Cage also studied Indian aesthetics with Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, where the purpose of music is "to quiet the mind and render it susceptible to divine influences." For Cage, the primary task became a meditational acceptance of nature.

Cage had begun integrating some chance-determination into his works using magic squares, but it was not until he was given a copy of the I Ching -- or Book of Changes -- by a precocious young Christian Wolff, that it became his primary means of composition. The I Ching teaches that each moment of the universe is a unity and that one must practise a faith in the rightness of the moment. In Eastern thought, as in the thought of Carl Jung, there are no accidents and chance does not exist.

In a career spanning from the early 50s to the present, Yoko has worked in many mediums -- poetry, texts, music, instruction scores, books and billboards to sculpture and drawings to video, and online. Weaving throughout much of her work is a focus on the power of the imagination, a zen-like simplicity/complexity, and a humanism. The following texts focus on giving an outline of her early work in concepts and creating a "music of the mind."

Making use of your Mind

Ono's works often create a wonderfully implausible and imaginary realm that may exist only within the mind. In event pieces such as Blue Room Event (1966) in which she wrote on the ceiling, "This is the floor", and on the wall "This room is bright blue", on a window sill "this window is 2000 ft. wide", she created a space at once humourous and wondrous, expandable by the imagination.

In her influential text, To the Wesleyan People (1966), outlines her thinking as follows: "At this point, what art can offer (if it can at all -- to me it seems) is an absence of complexity, a vacuum through which you are led to a state of complete relaxation of mind. After that you may return to the complexity of life again, it may not be the same, or it may be, or you may never return, but that is your problem."

As one of the first artists to move into a fully conceptualist orientation in her work, Ono gave precursors for both the Fluxus and Conceptual Art movements.

Sound, Poetry and the Imagination

Ideas around the imagination also reverberated within her hybrid use of sound and poetry, such as the early Secret Piece (1953):

SECRET PIECE

Decide on one note that you want to play
Play it with the following accompaniment:

     The woods from 5 a.m. to 8 a.m.
     in summer.


1953 summer

The above score is accompanied by a handwritten music notation that omits time-measurement, and reads above the treble clef, "With the accompaniment of the birds singing at dawn." Suggesting that the birds will sing the unmarked, to-be-imagined melody, the piece is at once delicate, punchy and clever.

Part of Ono's interest here is in the ever-expanability of the mind -- "The sound you play in your mind is different from the one that comes out. The sounds and music in your mind.. exist without the physical limitations of the real world."

Scores and audience participation

The use of the written score, an instruction set, focuses attention on the openness of the work of art itself, as to how it is both interpreted and realized. This openness is implicit in the notation for a musical composition, in which many factors affecting performance and listening experience are unspecified and unspecifiable, but it comes to the fore in conceptualist instruction pieces of the 1960s. For such works, the fact of open-ended interpretation is both part of their content and a defining feature of their ontological status.

Fluxus, a movement instigated and co-ordinated by it's impresario, George Maciunas, was a jubilant almagamation of people, ideas, performance, collaborations, with an underlying anti- art-establishment sentiment. By creating artworks that existed primarily as ideas, they could be interpreted and reproduced by anyone, anywhere, at anytime. This was used as a way to undermine both the ego-centric view of art-making, and the ensuing preciousness with which art is often viewed and collected.

Ono was the first artist to have a show in Maciunas's AG Gallery, and her ideas were influential on the formation of the movement. As a loosely collaborative group, Ono formed close friendships with others associated with the group, such as Nam June Paik and Charlotte Moorman.

Understanding the Timeline
The online timeline reflects real-time both in noting when a call was made, but also in how the sounds are played back. The "playback head" is in real-time, and reflects the time between calls as much as the calls themselves. Consequently, if left to run from the beginning, the timeline would play for 100 days.

Roll over a dot to see when a sound was left, and click to hear it. This will also reset the point in time from which the real-time playback continues. "Zoom in" with the scale marker at the base of the piece to view these time relationships in greater detail.


Back-end Technical Info
Due to interest in the project, we thought many of you might enjoy getting a picture of how the back-end worked. A hybrid of high and low-tech solutions made this piece possible. Messages being received by an (old 80s) answering machine were re-directed away from the message tape (through some rather delicate wiring) and into the sound-in of a Macintosh computer. An applet called Audiocorder sensed when a call was coming in by the increased sound-level, and began recording a digital file of it. The Macintosh contained both these sound files, the shockwave piece, and server software, so that the sounds became immediately available online.

Please feel free to contact us for further information.

This piece was open for the length of the exhibition Y E S  YOKO ONO at the Walker Art Center, (March 10 - June 17, 2001). It was created by Justin Bakse & Justin Braem, and produced by Trudy Lane.
Thank you and enjoy.