In a totally silent room, John Cage, an experimental artist, experienced “nonintention” for the first time and it set the direction for his art and his life. After that experience, whenever he set out to make a piece, he first created a set of guidelines and would then take himself out of his art by asking questions, such as “where should this line be placed and with which brush”, relying on pure chance to generate the work rather than reflecting on what he himself wanted to express.

“Then the answers, instead of coming from my likes and dislikes, come from chance operations, and that has the effect of opening me to possibilities that I hadn’t considered. ”

What happened if he didn’t like the answers provided by chance? He kept them anyway. He had committed to the process and chose instead to transform himself rather than what appeared so that he could uncover new and unexpected possibilities.

To practice making art with chance, Cage did some of the following:

Let go
He designed a set of questions and used the IChing, an ancient Chinese divination text to answer them, letting go of control over the solution.

Everything is valid
Instead of dismissing something as “boring”, he chose to sit with it until he realized that it wasn’t so. Being patient allows alternate readings to emerge.

Just start
His philosophy was to begin anywhere. There is no best place to begin.