john cage, chance and me.

This book was the first one I made at Mills. It was made right around John Cage’s 100th birthday. We each got assigned a random page from the dictionary the same letter as our first name. Then, we had to use that page somewhere in the book. We also had to think about John Cage and his ideas around creating work using chance operations. Very simply put chance operations is about trying to remove one’s intention from the work, leaving it up to chance through various exercises.

This book is a simple accordion with coin envelopes as pages. Each envelope is filled with cut up words from a lecture Cage gave in 1959 called  Lecture on Nothing. The name of the book is called echo, which was a word on the dictionary page I was given. I thought it was a great word to think about nothing with and also John Cage. If you aren’t into John Cage already, I would suggest getting to know him, he’s pretty crush worthy.