Document:Q10821
From Rhizome Artbase
This is a writing through a writing of a text that is largely considered unreadable. This text is a random regeneration of John Cage’s Fourth Writing through Finnegans Wake. To create the original text, Cage applied a system of complex rules to James Joyce’s seminal text, Finnegans Wake, to write a series of mesostics spelling “JAMES JOYCE” repeatedly down the page in capital letters. (A mesostic is a poem where a vertical phrase intersects lines of horizontal text). Cage used the same concepts of chance operations and systems based production that he applied to his music compositions, creating a writing free of intention.