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.
No good poem, however confessional it may be, is just a self-expression. Who on earth would claim that the pearl expresses the oyster?
Today, although as a whole, the industry is still male-dominated, more women are drawing comics than ever before, and there are more venues for them to see their work in print. In the 1950s, when the comic industry hit an all-time low, there was no place for women to go. Today, because of graphic novels, there's no place for aspiring women cartoonists to go but forward.
I'll give up this sort of touring madness certainly, but music-everything is based on music. No, I'll never stop my music.
The best stories come out of the truth.
Poetry is indispensable - if I only knew what for.
One should really use the camera as though tomorrow you'd be stricken blind.
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