[Q]: What would you say is your most important legacy to future generations?

[Cage:] Having shown the practicality of making works of art nonintentionally.

[Q] What is your favorite piece of wisdom?

[Cage:] The Huang Po Doctrine of Universal Mind. This is a text, not a phrase.

[Q:] Why?

[Cage:] I have no idea.

— from an interview with John Cage

For 25 years I made art — composing, directing, building companies, collaborating — taking it from Australia to Asia, Europe, the US and Africa. The work was always new and always on the edge.

Composer Gordon Kerry described my Thousands of Bundled Straw as 'like seeing a world in a grain of sand.' I was always attracted to the intricate, towards miniature detail, to complexity and precision, crystalline beauty and strangeness. I was painstaking and meticulous, but not thorough. I never revised or edited my music, rarely corrected mistakes. I composed all my music with ink on paper, drafting scores over hours and hours, calligraphically utter and impressive. I didn't really care what the music sounded like — I was more interested in the ideas and the relationships with the musicians, the listeners, what happens in between.

I collaborated because composing was too solitary and lonely. I could ignite passion in a group and rush toward almost any goal with vision and conviction that was frightening at times. I wanted the previously unexperienced, the unfamiliar. Gentle adventures diving into unexplored domains, with paradigm shifts and perceptual transformations.

Italo Calvino's Six Memos for the Next Millennium was my lodestone. Exactitude, multiplicity, I tried to master them all, especially quickness and lightness. And I really could make things happen, not just dream and plan them. I read once that Librans have a whim of steel — that's my star sign.

I no longer compose or direct performances, but I still consider myself an artist. This archive is a record of some of what was made.