Artists Space

A Memorial for Yasunao Tone

Sunday, January 18
4pm
RSVP required. Please RSVP here.

Please join the close friends of Yasunao Tone (1935–2025) for a special memorial celebrating his extraordinary life and work. The afternoon will feature performances by Lary 7, Shelley Hirsch, SCRAAATCH (E. Jane and chukwumaa), C. Spencer Yeh with Kwami Winfield, and John Zorn and Ikue Mori, among others. More information will be announced soon.

A black-and-white image shows a person seated behind a white desk, adjusting an audio device with their hands. The device is surrounded by replacement speakers with organically shaped wires. In the background, a projected video shows a landscape and a shadowy figure.
Yasunao Tone performing Molecular Music (1982–85) during a studio rehearsal, New York, c. 1990. [A black-and-white image shows a person seated behind a white desk, adjusting an audio device with their hands. The device is surrounded by replacement speakers with organically shaped wires. In the background, a projected video shows a landscape and a shadowy figure.]

“To fight with smart machines, you have to be very primitive.”
—Yasunao Tone

Born in Tokyo in 1935, Yasunao Tone was a radical, multidisciplinary artist who became a central figure in New York’s avant-garde scene. He graduated from Chiba University in 1957 with a degree in Japanese literature and emerged as a pivotal figure in postwar Japanese art during the 1960s. Tone was a key member of Group Ongaku, Team Random, and the Japanese branch of Fluxus, collaborating with collectives and artists including the Neo-Dada Organizers, Hi-Red Center, and Butoh founder Tatsumi Hijikata. After relocating to the United States in 1972, Tone helped shape the philosophical and material development of durational art across performance, music, and multimedia. He collaborated with dancers, visual artists, and musicians such as Merce Cunningham, Blondell Cummings, Allan Kaprow, Senga Nengudi, Butch Morris, and George Maciunas.

Tone’s work was defined by radical transformations of media into unpredictable forms, using both analog and digital systems. Beginning in the mid-1980s, most notably with Music for 2 CD Players (1985), he physically altered CDs to override error-correction systems, producing unpredictable playback—a hallmark of his experimental ethos. Later works, including MP3 Deviation (2007) and AI Deviation (2015), extended this approach by manipulating corrupted sound files at different speeds to explore media’s unpredictable potential. His fourteen-year Musicia Simulacra project, released in 2011 and partially on CD-ROM, sonified the Man’yōshū, the oldest existing collection of Japanese poetry, blending technology, vibration, and literary translation in a deeply philosophical undertaking. Tone described these interventions as paramedia, a term for his method of repurposing technological devices to “create pieces that are simultaneously multipliable and nonrepetitive.” Across his career, Tone consistently challenged conventional artistic forms, genres, and social expectations, remaining committed to experimentation and discovery.

    A color image shows a rectangular white desk in a darkened space. An audio device sits on the desk, surrounded by speakers and loose wires. A lamp illuminates the device’s controls, while two microphones hang above it, pointed downward. Behind the desk, wires from vertically mounted light sensors are visible in the shadows.
    Yasunao Tone Concert #2. Performance documentation, April 13, 2023, Artists Space. Photo: Destiny Mata [A color image shows a rectangular white desk in a darkened space. An audio device sits on the desk, surrounded by speakers and loose wires. A lamp illuminates the device’s controls, while two microphones hang above it, pointed downward. Behind the desk, wires from vertically mounted light sensors are visible in the shadows.]