Brian Eno: Let There Be Light
Artistic Cultivation
A conventional artist cranking out five paintings a day would need about 42,000 years to make 77 million paintings. “If I spent my whole life trying to make all these paintings as separate entities, I wouldn’t have gotten through even one ten thousandth of the number that this thing can generate,” says Eno. “It’s very prolific and economical. For very little input I get a lot of output.”
To make it all work, Dowie turned to Macromedia Director. “What Brian really wanted to do was to make sure it was more like a piece of art than a screensaver,” says Dowie. “The challenge was taking the images and working out very simple routines to randomly put them on the screen while keeping them in a high-resolution state. And we had to make it as simple as possible so there wasn’t a very high load on the processor. It was a lot of trial and error, but eventually we came up with a solution.” In its final iteration, “77 Million Paintings” displays from one to four images on the screen simultaneously. Some of Eno’s paintings are strictly background JPEGS; the rest are translucent PNG files that fade in and out above them.
Eno is pleased with the result, to say the least. “I like also the fact that I’m sitting watching this piece now and it’s doing something I’ve never seen before,” he says. “And it does it all day, every day. It’s creating combinations and clusters that are genuinely surprising to me and sometimes breathtakingly beautiful. It’s fantastic.”
“77 Million Paintings” doesn’t just feature visuals. Eno wrote bits and pieces of music for an evolving ambient track. The track is assembled like the paintings — layers of sound interwoven to create a complete piece that rarely repeats itself. Like all of his music, the track was written using Logic Pro. “Logic is inseparable from the way I make music,” says Eno. “One’s work is so much determined by the tools that one has. If you sit down with a piano you will write different music than if you sit down with a guitar or if you sit down with a violin. What you make is so much conditioned by the materials that you’re using to make it. And Logic is a very, very versatile, flexible, and strong material. I’m always finding things that I can do in Logic that I didn’t know I could do.”
New Habitats
Until recently it would’ve been logistically impossible for Eno to show 77 million paintings in a gallery. Now he can. The artist has displayed the project in Tokyo, London, Milan, and Venice and he’s scheduled to show it in Capri, Madrid, Palma, and Capetown. Initially, Eno had never planned to take “77 Million Paintings” on tour. The project was, after all, intended for the home. But again, the piece presented unforeseen opportunity and beauty. “For the first time, I saw two or three of these pieces sitting next to each other and it looked lovely to see them in groups. So we started to think about how we could group them. Do we just stick them on the wall like paintings or do we make a kind of meta-statement using a lot of them together?” The answer: Both. “We’ve done shows now with as many as 24 screens visible from one point and they’ve been very successful,” says Eno.
Eno and his team have designed and constructed several configurations for the live shows, including a massive pyramid of monitors enveloped by mirrors. “The floor and sides of the room were mirrored and the pyramid was effectively turned into a diamond,” says Robertson. “The project has really got us thinking about monitors and computers as sculptural elements.” Each show was (or will be) designed for each space. In Tokyo, the team used 57 Power Macs and iMacs to power the colony of displays. In London, they only used three computers and two monitors. “Every space inspires a different approach,” says Robertson. “It won’t ever be the same show twice.”
Natural Selection
“77 Million Paintings” continues to evolve. “We’ve been discussing the idea of using natural selection in the next project,” says Taylor. “When users see a combination of images they like, they’ll be able to hit a button and the computer will remember it. Likewise, the user will be able to kill certain combinations. At the end of a very long period of time, you’ll have a handful of images that have survived the selection process. Then the program will stop. Everyone’s choices will be different.” Eno could also work with some of his favorite artists to create entirely new sets of images and audio for future project. “They’re all just ideas now,” says Eno. “We’ll see where they end up.”
Eno has spent a great deal of his life sowing creative seeds and “77 Million Paintings” could be considered his most complex and fruitful project. It continues to grow and sprout new ideas, which makes Eno particularly proud. “One of the great breakthroughs of evolution theory is that you can start with simple things and they will grow into complexity,” he says. “This is very unintuitive — it’s one of these things that the human brain isn’t immediately capable of grasping. It doesn’t make sense until you see it. You have the idea that this small thing, which can’t contain that many instructions, produces this hugely complex interwoven, interdependent world. One of the things I like about this piece of work is that they stand as proof of that.”