The thoughts that Yoko Ono shared on her creative processes certainly made me rethink about the way we source out inspiration for practically any sort of project. I found it very intriguing that she was able to transform and transcribe the environment variables around her into her own musical notes. In essence, she was able to take the reality around her and transform it into something of her own – her own interpretation of her reality. This also brought up another point about artistic interpretation – while one may look at a particular art piece and give their own critique and comments about, it may not have conveyed the message that the artists themselves wished to convey to their audience. This maybe due to the passing of time and the subsequent decline in the people who actually knew what the piece meant, or simply because the piece itself was not executed properly.
Another important point from this dialogue was the idea that one must not constrain themselves to the regular, three-dimensional space that they are used to and must feel to think about how different elements may interact or fuse in higher dimensions. As Yoko said, “You can mix two paintings together in your mind- though physically that’s impossible to do.”
She brings up the idea of “mixing” the wind and a building, and while that sounds physically preposterous, her creativity and potential does not need to be tied down to the constraints of physical reality. Rather, she would think of how they would interact in higher dimensions, and bring them down to some form that is interpret-able in our familiar space. I think this point was particularly important to me because it was essentially talking about a concept-driven approach versus a practical, technical implementation oriented approach. As a computer scientist and programmer, I often neglect the concept and focus more on the actual implementation and technology so this dialogue helped me rethink the way I approach a creative project.