One viewing of this generative film will never fully encompass Brian Eno's oceanic intellect “I I started thinking of myself as someone who created things that would carry on having their own life,” Brian Eno says early on in the Eno documentary that I watched. Although who knows what he’ll say when you watch it. He’s talking about his interest in generative music: music fed into systems designed to alter it on every play through.
It’s a process, inspired by the increasing complexity of evolution, which Eno has been playing around with ever since his early experimental album ‘Discreet Music’ in 1975. “Instead of thinking ‘I’m going to make something’, you think ‘I’m going to plant something’,” he explains in a documentary constructed as just such an ever-evolving piece of art. To explain: Eno is a generative film.
Each time it’s screened or watched, it will be different. A software system constructs a new documentary from hundreds of pieces of footage with billions of possible variations; at key points in the film, you can even see it working in a burst of sound and code. Director Gary Hustwit can add extra scenes into the mix later on, allowing the film to keep growing and developing over years.
At various points a guest star – I got artist Laurie Anderson – picks out one of Eno’s legendary Oblique Strategy cards, designed in the ’70s to add a sense of experiment and unpredictability to albums such as Bowie ’s Berlin trilogy with com.
