It was not until 1988 that Cage’s schedule finally permitted him to return to Mountain Lake. At the beginning of April he arrived at the Horton Center and remained for a week-long workshop during which four series of works were produced. Following upon the 1983 “painting experiment,” stones collected from the New River were sorted into three groups according to size, which were separately numbered; numerous and varied brushes were divided into two separately numbered groups; likewise, feathers to paint with, colors and washes, and papers were also divided and numbered. In this way, chance procedures using pages of random numbers that were now generated by a computer program — a technology that Cage only recently had put to work to serve his novel purposes — could be used to determine the specific materials and processes to be utilized for each painting — which painting instruments, what type of paper and which colors, how many washes, which stones to paint around, where to locate the stones on the paper.