Brian Eno: Let There Be Light
Brian Eno paints with light. And his paintings, like the medium, shift and dance like free-flowing jazz solos or elaborate ragas. In fact, they have more in common with live music than they do with traditional artwork. “When I started working on visual work again, I actually wanted to make paintings that were more like music,” he says. “That meant making visual work that nonetheless changed very slowly.” Eno has been sculpting and bending light into living paintings for about 25 years, rigging galleries across the globe with modified televisions, programmed projectors, and three-dimensional light sculptures.
But Eno isn’t primarily known for his visual art. He’s known for shattering musical conventions as the keyboardist and audio alchemist for the ’70s glam rock legend Roxy Music. He’s known for fathering modern ambient music. He’s known for producing tracks for David Bowie, Talking Heads, and U2.
It’s easy to see how Eno’s stunning artwork could be overshadowed by his musical accomplishments. Music is easily consumed. You can listen to it almost anywhere. His artwork, which often involves complicated and cumbersome contraptions, simply can’t be viewed in your living room.
Until now. Eno has found a way to display his light paintings — about 77 million of them — in your home. The multidisciplinary artist, with the help of a few technical experts, has created a computer program that continually fuses his translucent light paintings to create an ever-evolving artistic display on your computer screen. The piece is accompanied by a randomly assembled ambient track that’s never the same twice. The program is capable of creating about 77 million permutations of Eno’s visual work and is titled, appropriately, “77 Million Paintings.”
Television=Light
TVs are nothing more than complicated light bulbs. Eno first grasped this concept in the late ’70s. “When I started playing with video, I suddenly had the realization that video was really about manipulating light, not manipulating images,” he says. “Now it just so happens that because of the history of television — television comes out of cinema, cinema comes out of theater — we expect that there will always be images, that it’s to do with narratives and references to real life.”
Eno had something different in mind. He wanted to use TVs to create abstract visual artwork — that is, light paintings. “For the first time it was possible to have a highly controllable light source,” he says. “I could specify absolutely exactly what happened to every point on the screen in terms of light. Of course, everyone knows that, but they don’t think about it in that sense, they don’t think about television as being like a light painting, which is what I wanted to do.”
At first, Eno simply turned the idea TV on its head, taking it out of the narrative space and thrusting it into the realm of portraiture. He videotaped the view from his New York apartment and displayed it in galleries. The shows were a smash hit — the serene scenes enthralled gallery goers for hours. Eno went on to create three-dimensional, ziggurat-like light sculptures using old picture tubes and foam core board. He also experimented with slide projectors and slowly changing abstract images.
Eno’s artwork blossomed in the midst of his musical career. Still, it was nearly impossible to deliver his visual creations to the masses. That all changed around the turn of the 21st century. “I walked passed a rather posh house in my area with a great big huge screen on the wall and a dinner party going on,” he says. “The screen on the wall was black because nobody’s going to watch television when they’re having a dinner party. Here we have this wonderful, fantastic opportunity for having something really beautiful going on, but instead there’s just a big dead black hole on the wall. That was when I determined that I was somehow going to occupy that piece of territory.”
Sowing Seeds
Eno knew that that it would be easy to display his light paintings on a high-definition screen, but he wanted something more. He would create a program that could, on its own, continually generate new artwork for the viewer. The concept is called “generative” and it produces a remarkable amount of artwork. “What I’m really doing when I work generatively is I’m making seeds. Then I’m planting them, in the case of ‘77 Million Paintings,’ in your computer,” says Eno. “Then the seed grows into all the different kinds of flowers it can produce.”
The artist gathered a small group of digital media gardeners to help him cultivate the project. For image processing, he turned to graphic artist Nick Robertson. Dominic Norman Taylor, the head of All Saints Records, came on board to help with production. Programmer and digital video specialist Jake Dowie was hired to compile the program that would ultimately fuse Eno’s light paintings into new creations. The team used Macs almost exclusively.
“It’s very hard for me to actually think how I would work if I didn’t have a Mac,” says Eno. “I’ve been very happy with they way the interface works. My relationship with the computer is what I care about and I think it’s easy to have a very smooth and enjoyable relationship with a Mac.”
More than 300 Eno paintings — most of them scratched or inked onto slides — were digitized for “77 Million Paintings.” Robertson painstakingly scanned and retouched every one using Adobe Photoshop and a Mac. “I was taking handcrafted elements and incorporating them into digital environments,” he says. “And the transition from the original painting to the digital version is almost seamless.” Robertson labored for more than a year, touching up each image and adding transparent and translucent sections to allow overlap. Once the images were scanned and processed, it was up to Dowie to make them grow within the confines of a computer.
