I use the computer as a tool. Like chance or the camera or the other tools I've used, it can open my eye to other ways of seeing or of making dances. It's not simply to do a trick.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes that technology is a means to enhance creativity rather than just a gimmick.
Merce Cunningham highlights the role of computers as tools in the creative process, similar to how dancers use various instruments to explore and express themselves in new ways. He suggests that the computer, like chance and the camera, can broaden one's perspective and facilitate artistic expression, rather than being merely a technological trick.
In practice
During a lecture on modern dance techniques, one could use this quote to illustrate the integration of technology in artistic expression.
The most essential thing in dance discipline is devotion, the steadfast and willing devotion to the labor that makes the classwork not a gymnastic hour and a half, or at the lowest level, a daily drudgery, but a devotion that allows the classroom discipline to become moments of dancing too.
Movement is expressive. I've never denied that. I don't think there's such a thing as abstract dance.
I think the thing that we agreed to so many years ago, actually, was that the music didn't have to support the dance nor the dance illustrate the music, but they could be two things going on at the same time.
My dance classes were open to anybody, my only stipulation was that they had to come to the class every day.
It's always thrilling to encounter the sweep of time in a work of fiction in a way that feels authentic and real.
Art is the final cunning of the human soul which would rather do anything than face the gods.
Great art is never produced for its own sake. It is too difficult to be worth the effort.
In the music business, we all do different things, but we sit there and admire other people who can write a song differently or sing differently. It's not so competitive.
Now sexual obsessions are the basis of artistic creation. Accumulated frustration leads to what Freud calls the process of sublimation. Anything that does not take place erotically sublimates itself in the work of art
What reinforces the content of a photograph is the sense of rhythm - the relationship between shapes and values.
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