Is Yoko Ono an early prompt engineer?!

written by Stefan Christoph

November 2, 2024 - One minute read

Sounds like a random question, but I think she is. She is prompting the audience to interact and participate in her art works.

So basically she has been often provided simple text prompts, to engage viewers to become agents — human ones, active participants — happily embracing the unpredictability of audience responses in the overall system. Sample prompts: “Observe three paintings carefully. Mix them well in your head”, “Draw a map to get lost”. Earlier version of the later which has some step by step instructions is in one of the attached pictures.

In prompt engineering for production systems we spend a lot of effort to get reliable and repeatable results — and prompt wording is only one of the levers, next to decoding settings and evaluation. In that respect the aim differs from art, where you can utilise the stochastic sampling that makes LLM outputs vary.

Just a random thought on a Saturday afternoon. No art expertise or drugs involved.

Exhibition is in the K20 in Düsseldorf at the moment.

📝 Last updated: August 13, 2026 — Technical corrections from a quality audit