Yoko Ono’s “Poem No. 86” and “Fly Piece” (both 1963) are each one-word event scores, offering the imperative “fly” (not to be confused with the announcement, in Japanese, for a vernissage at the Naikua gallery Tokyo titled “Fly”). A second “Fly Piece” (1964) recalls her three “Kite Piece” poems with their instructions to fly kites (“you may make balloons instead of kites,” the third allows); it opens: “Skin two thousand balloons,” thus attracting the paragram flay. The last of Ono’s Thirteen Film Scores gives the scenario: “Let a fly walk on a woman’s body from toe to head and fly out the window”; her 1970 film Fly did just that, moving between noun and verb, while the accompanying score imitates the sounds she imagines a fly would make. Daniel Temkin’s fly piece follows this logic a step further; the grid of similar images, surveying a domestic space with their distorting curvatures and filtered colors suggest the compound ommatidia of the muscidae gaze: a contact sheet from a movie seen by the fly. Moreover, with its coded inscription of the word spelled out letter by letter to the screen, the impersonations come full circle; the putative fly takes on Ono’s role as poet, by writing.
Thanks for the wonderful response, Craig! I love this reading, of the fly as poet.
A bit more context for others reading this: the code, made up of the images seen here, run in the Light Pattern programming language: http://lightpattern.info/. Since dominant color is part of the language’s lexicon, I put a filter awkwardly on a gopro like so, before throwing it in the air (making it “fly”):
Yoko Ono’s “Poem No. 86” and “Fly Piece” (both 1963) are each one-word event scores, offering the imperative “fly” (not to be confused with the announcement, in Japanese, for a vernissage at the Naikua gallery Tokyo titled “Fly”). A second “Fly Piece” (1964) recalls her three “Kite Piece” poems with their instructions to fly kites (“you may make balloons instead of kites,” the third allows); it opens: “Skin two thousand balloons,” thus attracting the paragram flay. The last of Ono’s Thirteen Film Scores gives the scenario: “Let a fly walk on a woman’s body from toe to head and fly out the window”; her 1970 film Fly did just that, moving between noun and verb, while the accompanying score imitates the sounds she imagines a fly would make. Daniel Temkin’s fly piece follows this logic a step further; the grid of similar images, surveying a domestic space with their distorting curvatures and filtered colors suggest the compound ommatidia of the muscidae gaze: a contact sheet from a movie seen by the fly. Moreover, with its coded inscription of the word spelled out letter by letter to the screen, the impersonations come full circle; the putative fly takes on Ono’s role as poet, by writing.
Thanks for the wonderful response, Craig! I love this reading, of the fly as poet.
A bit more context for others reading this: the code, made up of the images seen here, run in the Light Pattern programming language: http://lightpattern.info/. Since dominant color is part of the language’s lexicon, I put a filter awkwardly on a gopro like so, before throwing it in the air (making it “fly”):
Hm looks like the image did not post, but you can find it here: http://lightpattern.info/Content/LightPattern/images/LP_gopro_small.jpg