Brian Eno once wrote, “Our grandchildren might look at us in amazement and say, ‘You mean you’ve been listening to the exact same thing over and over again?'” The speculation comes from an essay he wrote about what he calls “generative music,” music that is automatically generated by digital systems according to rules and preferences set by humans. “Like a live performance, it is always different. Like recorded music, it has no time or place limitations.” The term was first introduced about 30 years ago in his book “Generative Music.” A year with a swollen appendix. He now has at least one grandson, whose handwriting appears in one of the music videos for his latest solo album, and while that particular piece may be non-generative, his interest in the notion of generativity in art continues.
This year, Eno Genetic Documentary Director Gary Hustwit talks about his life as an artist, music producer and “soundscape painter.” Helvetica Other non-fiction films about design. new york TimesRob Tannenbaum writes: that Eno “This is nothing like a portrait of a musician; it’s not even a portrait, as it’s not fixed or static. Instead, Hustwit used a proprietary software program to reconfigure the length, structure, and content of the film.” This was in keeping with both Eno’s professional philosophy and his antipathy to the traditional documentary format. “Our lives are stories that we write and rewrite,” Tannenbaum quotes him as writing in an email. “There is no single, reliable narrative of life.”
In fact, there are about 52 quintillion different stories, Eno “You could make a 10-hour series about Brian and it would barely scratch the surface of everything he accomplished,” Hustwit said in an interview. he told The Verge.“Last week we added a bunch of footage for the second week of screenings at Film Forum that we didn’t have in the system before,” he said. “Not only can we keep digging through the footage and bringing in new stuff, but we can keep changing the software as well. And who knows what the film will look like a year from now, or what the streaming version will look like.”
What Eno didn’t need to clarify in 1996 but Hustwit must in 2024 is that this kind of generative film isn’t generated by artificial intelligence. Hustwit emphasizes that “the data set is all our material,” which includes 30 hours of interviews and 500 hours of traditionally shot film, and he characterizes his company’s custom software, which he calls by the acronym Brain One, as “kind of like gardening.” The metaphor could have come directly from Eno himself. Who spoke? “It changes the concept of the composer from someone at the top of the process, dictating exactly how it’s executed, to someone at the bottom of the process, carefully planting selected seeds.” Ultimately, “you stop thinking of yourself as the controller, and you as the audience, and start thinking of us all as the audience, all of us as people enjoying the garden together.”
Related content:
Eno: This 1973 mini-documentary charts the early days of Brian Eno’s solo career.
Watch Brian Eno’s “Video Paintings”: Where 1980s TV Technology Meets Visual Art
Brian Eno creates music and art as imaginary landscapes (1989)
How David Byrne and Brian Eno make music together: a short documentary
clock Another Green WorldBrian Eno’s Hypnotic Portrait (2010)
Watch Brian Eno’s Artificial Intelligence Experimental Film “The Ship”
Based in Seoul, Colin MaOnershall Writing and broadcastingHe has written papers on cities, languages, and cultures, and his projects include the Substack newsletter. Books about cities And books A city without a state: Walking through 21st-century Los Angeles. Follow us on Twitter CollinhamOnershall or Facebook.
