The Heart of No Place as a Reinterpretation of Works by Yoko Ono in the Digital Age

1. Introduction

The Heart of No Place (written in the late 1990s and produced 2000-2009) is an experimental narrative film, and as such, it aims to create an emotional experience rather than to engage the viewer in a discourse. At the same time, it was born on a formal and conceptual migratory arc from performance-, installation and other hybrid practices into the digital media, and contains thoughts on the relationship between the human conditions, media and technology. These ideas are incorporated into the narrative as lines spoken by characters varying in personality and in their relationship to Y., in a series of "faux-interviews" and images and titles woven throughout the film.

2. Background

It was during the years of "Trade War with Japan," that I had the idea of working with a story revolving around the life and work of Yoko Ono. I was working on media-and-dance performance piece Tokyo Rose, which juxtaposed the late 20^th-century’s "Trade War" in the mass media with WWII propaganda attributed to a Los Angeles-born Japanese American, Iva Toguri. American reactions to "Trade War" were rife with anti-Japanese (or anti-Asian, as the murder of Vincent Chin
Vincent Chin (1955-1982) in Detroit in 1982 proved) sentiment and references to WWII-era stereotypes. That was why Blade Runner
Blade Runner (1982, Ridley Scott)’s "Yellow Peril" opening scenes struck a chord with its American viewers, who still hold the film as a dystopian masterpiece [i]. It was in this atmosphere that I heard a rumor accusing Ono of having been "planted by a Japanese Corporation to break up the Beatles."

I could not forget this silly rumor. It kept growing in my mind, into a sort of science-fiction, parallel-world scenario in which Ono’s brand of time-and-space-defying artworks foreshadowed what would come to be the digitally plugged-in lifestyle we have now. As with all Fluxus artists and practitioners of post-WWII live art, Ono’s work took art out of museums into the street, breaking down socioeconomical barriers that traditionally existed between those who can afford works or art and those who don’t [ii]. She, with Lennon, took these "new art" applications a step further, using their celebrity as a medium to deliver their anti-war messages, or even turning their marriage into an act symbolizing breaking down of barriers that existed between cultures and classes. The Beatles seemed a small casualty.

The "present" of The Heart of No Place is set in 1999, with flashbacks to 1979 when Y. meets her husband, The Artist Known as John –– or simply, JOHN. The time frame was shifted by a decade from the real Ono-Lennon saga
John Lennon and Yoko Ono, Bed-In for Peace (1969) in order to bring the narrative closer to my own experiences; for example, in their "Breakfast in Bed"
film still, The Heart of No Place performance, Y. and JOHN are protesting nuclear arms race of the 1980s rather than the Vietnam War.

3. Andrea
Sarah Holbert in The Heart of No Place

The idea of Ono’s work as precursors to our digital culture is presented by the character Andrea, a young writer who worships Y. She calls Y.’s "Task Haikus," a series of writings modeled after Ono’s Instruction Paintings, a "virtual theater": choreographed experiences compacted into a few written lines. Instead of going to a theater or a museum, the experience can be had at home, simply by engaging the viewer’s own imagination. (For the scene of Y.’s 1979 gallery opening, a series of type-written index cards were framed and installed in a gallery as representations of these "Haikus.") On the phone with Andrea, Y. visualizes a scene
film still, The Heart of No Place from one of her "Haikus": a sewing machine and an umbrella in a fish bowl in which snow is falling (reference to Ono’s "PAINTING FOR A BROKEN SEWING MACHINE"
Yoko Ono, from Grapefruit [iii] and a line in Lautréamont’s Les Chants de Maldoror [iv]).

The idea of the written language as a media container of portable, virtual dramatic experiences is expanded as Y. recalls scenes from her youth in Tokyo
footage of Tokyo in the 1980s by Brigitte Krause, in The Heart of No Place. The urban experience of living in close proximity to others heightened the Tokyoites’ need to create and maintain personal space. Commuters on the impossibly crowded public transportation buried their faces in paperback novels (virtual theater) whenever space permitted. Then sometimes in the ‘70s, manga (virtual film), as it diversified to attract adult readers, proportionately increased, until finally Walkmans (virtual concerts) arrived. Of course, this rapid and extreme urbanization cannot be separated from the country’s postwar economic "miracle." Japan’s "astonishing" economic recovery began in the ashes of bombed-out cities –– the fact etched into my psyche through tales of starvation and air raids by my mother and grandmother –– and became, during the "Trade War," the cause of suspicion and dread in the American media. (The target of this resentment seems to have now shifted to China.)

Y. is at first surprised by Andrea’s interpretation, but eventually agrees with her in tracing the origin of her work to postwar Japan’s rapid population growth and urbanization. She confesses that it did not make any sense to be making large, cumbersome objects in this environment. Flashbacks show Y. meeting her husband, the Artist Known as John ("JOHN"), at her 1979 exhibition, then, walking in a park
film still, The Heart of No Place, where she tells him:

Everyone can carry a little theater in her head/or a park, or an ocean/because our imagination can fit anywhere/it’s so small yet infinite.

Andrea then asks Y. to comment on a symbiotic relationship between the United States and Japan in developing technology. This is, as Y. points out to the younger woman, just the opposite of what the American public felt in the late 20^th century, when Japanese improvements on products closely identified with the American lifestyle, i.e., automobile and television, were blamed for unemployment and trade deficit. Seldom talked about was –– and still is –– the fact that American technology was licensed to Japanese companies during the postwar years as part of the U.S. efforts to strengthen the Japanese economy; a happy ally was a loyal ally in the U.S.’s "war" against Soviet Union. [v] [vi] [vii] Andrea says: "Japan would come up with a better hardware. They [Americans] will get a little grumpy for a while . . ." Y. replies: "Then the soft will change to suit the new hardware. Never thought of it like that."

When Andrea meets Y. for the first time at the opening of her 1999 exhibition (sculptural installation "Two Brides," taking inspiration from both Ono’s Instruction Painting [viii] and Duchamp’s The Large Glass
Marcel Duchamp, The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even (1915-23)), she compares Y.’s proposed film project (modeled after Ono’s "ON FILM NO.4 (in taking the bottoms of 365 saints of our time)" (1967) [ix] to effects created with Morph. In "ON FILM NO. 4" Ono wrote:

"My ultimate goal in filmmaking is to make a film which includes a smiling face snap of every single human being in the world . . . This way, if Johnson wants to see what sort of people he killed in Vietnam that day, he only has to turn the channel. Before this you were just part of a figure in the newspapers." [x] [xi]

By comparing it to Morph, Andrea is referring to what happens to the faces when they are run together as a filmstrip: When images that are similar in proportion, such as human faces, are shown in rapid succession in a motion sequence, the eyes perceive the images as blended. The viewer is free to imagine the image that emerges from this blur to be, as Y. wistfully puts it, "an essence of mankind." Andrea points out to Y: "This has been a much-imitated idea."

This associative interpretation of "ON FILM NO. 4" sprang from my experience of working in 1986-87 as a photographer on L.A. Disc, a laserdisc project that aimed (I left the project before its completion) to capture scenes from Los Angeles, utilizing the then-novel digital disc’s playback capability that gave the viewer an option of watching the footages as films, or viewing each frame as one would a catalog of still images. Of course, the mainstream use of digital disc medium now is duplication of theatrical films –– with the definition of "interactivity" expanded beyond variations in playback speed. This experience of shooting a quantity of still images to work as sequences, however, led to my work with slide animation in the 1990s.

Andrea concludes her first conversation with Y. on her own, slightly dystopian note: "information red dwarf theory (actually, the correct term for a star at its end stage of evolution is "white dwarf)," with which she elaborates on our culture’s tendency to recycle the old content ideas when a new platform –– like internet or vastly expanded digital storage –– opens up.

4. The Assistant
Charles Lane in The Heart of No Place

Although Y. professes to be "not a technophile," her private life is permeated with digital media. In the opening sequence we see her surfing the web and finding the database of the war dead (this conflict is simply called "The War" in the film, as the U.S. has been in a perpetual state of war), as she ruminates on the destination of such data: "from black granite to Technicolor." The scene combines live footage shot with slide animation and digital animation to create a ghostly wall of names. She later tells her Assistant –– who has also lost his partner –– that she finds herself looking for digital representations of her dead husband. She is both fascinated by the fact that there are so many incarnations of him in the consumer-created media, and disturbed by the fact each blogger "seems to claim an intimate knowledge of him." The Assistant reassures her that it’s because JOHN’s songs stirs varied, personal responses in his listeners.

Y. and the Assistant discuss the list of the war dead, memorials to the victims of AIDS and even a virtual cemetery for dead Tamagotchis (a "virtual pet" popular in the early ‘90s). Y. marvels aloud how this internet culture has been created from a mere figment of imagination. She believes "if enough people believed in something, it became real" –– Ono’s Wish Tree
Yoko Ono, Wish Tree (1990s - ) collectivized. The Assistant agrees: "That’s how heaven and hell came into existence" and proposes that we have created a virtual heaven for the departed souls on the internet. This is a "heaven" that the living can visit, like a cemetery, and functions as a gathering place. While we might visit graves of their ancestors once a year, or gather at a memorial on anniversaries, this "heaven" is open all the time and can be accessed without leaving one’s home. He might as well be talking about what cultural anthropologist Michael Wesch calls "YouTube community," or about social network media where public mourning is not infrequent.

5. Daniel Mohn
Daniel Lynch Millner in The Heart of No Place

Y. is approached by Daniel Mohn, a visionary founder and CEO of Monosoft to appear, with her late husband, in its advertisement campaign. (Inspired by Ono & Lennon on Apple billboards
TBWA\Chiat\Day, "Think Different" campaign for Apple, Inc. (1997-2002) , the campaign in film alters the motto to a facetious "Just Think"
"Monosoft" billboard with Holger Czukay, The Heart of No Place –– inviting roll-over association with "Imagine.") Originally, Mohn was to explain his desire to include them by stating that her art had inspired a "whole generation of geeks." This was supplanted by the other, more important reason: he wanted them because of their contributions in ending the Cold War.

Mohn tells Y.:

"The Cold War wasn’t won by missiles. It wasn’t the hardware, it wasn’t even the rhetoric. It was won by people like you and your husband. It was the arts of the Free World that kept leaking through, until it became the flood that broke down the Berlin Wall."
film still, The Heart of No Place

Y. counters that the Western bloc’s relative, material wealth had made itself seem glamorous to people living in Communist states. Mohn replies:

"That's why it's our responsibility to propose a new direction –– in consumerism, if you'd like. It's quite obvious we cannot go on expanding materialistically; there's no room on this Earth. It's time to go deep, not big.  High time we started thinking about the quality of life on this planet."

Mohn is talking about the sort of virtual consumption facilitated by his products –– his idea is echoed by Andrea, who counts Y. among the pioneers of mediated experiences and post-object art. [xii] But Y., having just learned that Monosoft is expanding its business to film and music, imagines Monosoft would function like movie studios and record labels of the 20^th century. Like Monosoft’s intended consumers, she has no frame of reference other than the old model of the content industry. iPod went on sale in 2001, mainstreaming what had been digital piracy; Before Apple, Sony was already in business in the content industry as CBS/Sony when they introduced compact discs (1982) and Discman (1984), and would later acquire both CBS Records (1987) and Columbia Pictures (1989). [xiii] As someone with roots in the 20^th-century avant-garde, she is naturally wary of Capitalism and consumer technology co-opting the creative energies of artists and misrepresenting, or even compromising, their work.

Mohn for his part is on another mission, fueled by his own vision. He argues that transnational corporations are helping developing economies by creating infrastructures as a way out of "tourist economy," and that the wars in the 20^th century were "spasms" out of old colonialist economy. He is a neoliberal who believes in the growing global communication network and the free-market Transnationalism it supports as harbingers of social change for the better. Y., on the other hand, suspects it will lead to exploitation of developing economies and exacerbate social inequality.

To Y.’s contention that Monosoft is using the music and the likenesses of artists like JOHN to improve their image, he replies: "To enhance. And to remind everybody that software isn't just for computers." Mohn defines "the soft" as "the human factor," representative of the creative and/or intellectual process. He calls the 21^st Century "the Century of the Soft" and predicts:

"American economy will depend on the soft, as exchange of intellectual and creative properties will be the primary focus of global economy. And the lines will be blurred between what we always thought were polar opposites, like sciences and the arts, business and the arts.

Y. replies: "Like Renaissance."

Then, could it have been the American content industry –– rather than "a Japanese corporation" implicated in the "Trade War"-era rumor –– that gained from the breakup of the Beatles? Is New World/Old World a divide still recognized by this culture? Or are we talking about East/West?

Mohn reminds Y. that technological innovations has enabled all to be artists:

"Before photography, we had to pay a trained painter for the portraits of out loved ones. There was no way the poor could afford it, even though remembering our forebears was the first desire that distinguished man from apes."

Y., too, has been enabling her viewers by making artworks that can only be completed by them, Fluxus-style. Mohn follows up:

"In the 1970s, the Pope predicted that Capitalism and Communism will come together in 500 years. Of course, it did just that in less than thirty. But if I had told you a hundred years ago that a man would walk on the moon, you would have laughed at me. You can never underestimate the power of people's desire to move history."

He has learned from Akio Morita
Akio Morita (1921-1999) with the first transistor televition, c. 1960, the co-founder of Sony who said his company does not ask the public what it wants. Monosoft, like Sony, and later Apple, leads by showing the consumers what they will want (these two in particular seem to understand the sex –– visual and tactile –– appeal of devices). Creating desire has been the guiding principle for Mohn, both in his inventions and marketing. In this position, the character of Daniel Mohn articulates another facet of Ono’s work. Pablo J. Rico states in his "Seduction of the Gaze and Life Experience in the Work of Yoko Ono":

The artist has referred often to her work as a way to create desire. "All my works are a form of wishing. Keep wishing while you participate." [xiv]

Mohn thus becomes Y.’s shadow twin, the flip side of a coin –– their paths both lead to a new world, one through consumer technology, and the other, through a more personal practice of art-making. In her vision, Y. sees in a deserted museum a giant, egg-shaped globe. Inside, a naked man curled in fetal position is writhing: Dali’s Geopoliticus Child Witnessing the Birth of the New Man
Salvador Dalí, Geopoliticus Child Witnessing the Birth of the New Man (1943) (1943).

6. Guests

Art opening guests pitch in throughout the film, reevaluating Ono and Lennon’s –– Y. and JOHN’s –– work. These scenes, shot in a faux-interview style that culminates in the film’s "Guitar Envy" chapter, intentionally blur the line between the original (Ono and Lennon) and the fictional. One guest states: "They recognized their fame, or notoriety, as a medium. And their lives became the message." Two Art Critics, played by pioneering performance-art duo Bob & Bob, add:

"Art and politics aren't often effective when mixed –– unless the form is so far out that it becomes the vehicle for social change."

"20th century art was about the medium . . . In the second half of the century, artists . . .  dispensed with the traditional medium. Their collaboration, on the other hand, went far beyond by adapting the pre-existing network of mass media and exalted the content into message."

More guests comment on culture, commodity and the global culture. Some were ultimately cut from the finished film: "Access –– not ownership –– defines wealth"; "They were the first globally recognizable brand." Others survived the edit –– two Guests, in Che Guevara T-shirts (the actors/interviewees’ own costume choices) nod at each other in approval:

"During that war, Capitalism came to be known as "Free Trade"

"All wars are trade wars."

Yet another explains America’s cultural domination in the postwar world:

"It seemed to go as planned for a while. Hollywood movies and rock’n’roll. The world danced to the intoxicating vitality of the postwar America until . . ."

She leaves the thought unfinished; what would follow, of course, are the Beatles and the British Invasion. Later in the film, a History Professor (Dorothy Jensen Payne, 1921-2010) explains the European brain drain that vitalized the American postwar culture: "Europe was devastated. Not only by bombs but by emigration of its minds."

While working on her glass piece, Y. hears in her head, another contribution to the commentary pool in Daniel Mohn’s voice:

"The history of civilization is history of building communication networks –– of roads; conquering or negotiating through enemy territories, engineering bridges –– on which people, goods and ideas traveled. Information became faster and cheaper to convey. The vehicle shrank until the idea outweighed the vehicle."

This was written in tribute to my father Shoji Obara (1926-1998) who studied the development of transportation networks in Japan.

7. Resolution and Y.’s works

Several events comprise the "catalyst" leading to the film’s emotional resolution (as a fictional artwork, the film does not propose a social or political solution). In one
film still, The Heart of No Place, Y. prepares a tuna sandwich for her grown son and sees "one thousand suns in the sky" (a direct quotation from Ono’s "TUNAFISH SANDWICH PIECE,"
Yoko Ono, from Grapefruit 1964 [xv]). That night, Y. draws a chess board with sugar on her glass desk and builds a city of sugar cubes
film still, The Heart of No Place into which a plane dives (shot, by coincidence, on the eve of 9/11). The chess board is revealed to be a mock-up for the climactic scene of dancers smashing, and leaving champagne flutes half-filled with milk on, a giant glass chessboard (in a combination of several Ono works: White Chess Set
Yoko Ono, White Chess Set (1966), 1966; song "Walking on Thin Ice," 1981 and the image of half-full glass of water that has recurred in Ono’s works and writings since 1981). Y. encounters a group of joggers
Kristin Megner in The Heart of No Place during her daily walk in a park, all listening to music we can’t hear –– some of it presumably by JOHN –– on Japanese, or imitation Japanese, play-back devices.

         The first half of final chapter shows Y.’s inner experience of performing her "Nailing Piece," inspired by Ono’s Painting to Hammer a Nail In
Yoko Ono, Painting to Hammer a Nail In (1966), for the first time in public. She had previously thought the piece would remain hypothetical, for its potentially inflammatory imagery. There are many version of this Painting by Ono, ranging from Instruction Paintings to the 1999 version
Yoko Ono, Painting to Hammer a Nail In (1999) in which she herself hammered a nail into a life-size wooden cross. While her earlier Instruction Paintings ("Painting to Hammer a Nail," 1961 & 1962 [xvi]) also served as prototypes for Y.’s other artworks that uses broken glass, this 1999 performance was the direct inspiration for "The Nailing Piece." Only it is a painter’s easel, carried like a cross
Chris Maher in The Heart of No Placeby Atlas. Y. composes the "Nailing Piece" when she returns to her studio after scattering JOHN’s ashes into the ocean. The wooden easel
film still, The Heart of No Place, clumsily put together and looking more like a medieval torture instrument than an easel, is most likely kept in this conceptual artist’s studio as a curious object or a humorous/symbolic reminder of her roots in visual arts. But the parallel becomes obvious: Lennon sang "They’re gonna crucify me" in "Ballad of John and Yoko." JOHN died as an artist –– although this is not shown in the film –– as a result of his fame and possibly because of the messages he embodied. The easel becomes a symbol of Y.’s psychic pain. As the easel is carried away by Atlas, at once the Geopoliticus Child and the New Man, thoughts that occur to her are on the limits and destiny of freemarket capitalism:

Wealth is not wealth when there is nothing it can buy/Like heat, a byproduct of conversion/of the matter from one form to another form of another name to another value.

There are no religious wars/There are no ideological wars/ All wars are trade wars.

Does the sun travel westward?/Does the wind?"

Phrase "virtual money" was much on my mind during the making of this movie. Of course, it came down as the credit crisis as I was finishing it (2008-2009).

8. Conclusion

When the film won the "Best Film" award at London Independent Film Festival, the online catalogue described it "a modern-art reinterpretation of Yoko Ono’s life and work." The writer was right, but only partially. It is a postmodern, rather than modern, reinterpretation of Ono’s work, and an attempt at repositioning them as an inspiration shared by the new generation of art- and mediamakers. It is also a search for social and historical background for why Ono’s work Needless to say, Ono herself charges ahead, completely plugged-in. In addition to continuation of her "traditional" outputs in installations and sculptures that disseminate her messages for world peace, she generously allows her music to be re-mixed by younger musicians, allowing herself to be replicated through sampling.

Additional Readings:

David Byrne: "The internet will suck all creative content out of the world," The Guardian, 11 October, 2013
–– Byrne kvetches like it's (still) 1999.

List of Ono works referenced in the film

The Heart of No Place Production Notes

Director statement