The everyday life of signs is useful for producing abstractions, while the personal everyday is usually quite concrete, being dominated by detail. These two together provide the sources for performance art. The signs of everyday life lead to universal concepts while the personal are represented by glimpses of the unique, original living being called "I."

Many things contribute subliminally to my illusions. There are memos and sketches in various forms as well as fragments of words and images from every imaginable source ─ from advertisements, want ads in newspapers and television commercials to the colors and shapes of whatever apparel is in style, the industrial products that flood the market one after another and sometimes even unexpected things like the design of the back of a computer.

Another source of images is the actions of people, for example the movement of people at a station in rush hour or the lines of cars in heavy traffic or the gestures of lovers waiting for each other and the way they kiss. From these, I store images of the movements and the emotions I read behind them.

Sometimes, these fragments connect to each other, although not in any coherent way, to form a story. This story is somewhat like a dream, or perhaps more accurately, a condition of "mixed media" in which reality and imagination intermingle.

The power of imagination. From daily life, images and fragments . . . I decided to call these "Cheap Media Chips." Salvador Dali called it surrealism; later Susan Sonntag described performance as the reemergence of surrealism. They are fragments of ideas and this is what I was referring to when I described performance as similar to dreams. To my thinking, today's society might be called a society of a new surrealism which sells dreams under the name of information .