Brian Eno: Let There Be Light Gallery
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Brian Eno: Let There Be Light Gallery By Dustin Driver Brian Eno paints with light. And his paintings, like Eno’s artwork blossomed in the midst of his musical the medium, shift and dance like free‑flowing jazz career. Still, it was nearly impossible to deliver his solos or elaborate ragas. In fact, they have more in visual creations to the masses. That all changed common with live music than they do with traditional around the turn of the 21st century. “I walked past a artwork. “When I started working on visual work rather posh house in my area with a great big huge again, I actually wanted to make paintings that were screen on the wall and a dinner party going on”, he more like music”, he says. “That meant making visual says. “The screen on the wall was black because work that nonetheless changed very slowly”. Eno has nobody’s going to watch television when they’re been sculpting and bending light into living having a dinner party. Here we have this wonderful, paintings for about 25 years, rigging galleries across fantastic opportunity for having something really the globe with modified televisions, programmed beautiful going on, but instead there’s just a big projectors and three‑dimensional light sculptures. dead black hole on the wall. That was when I determined that I was somehow going to occupy that But Eno isn’t primarily known for his visual art. He’s piece of territory”. known for shattering musical conventions as the keyboardist and audio alchemist for ’70s glam rock Sowing Seeds legends Roxy Music. He’s known for fathering Eno knew that that it would be easy to display his modern ambient music. He’s known for producing light paintings on a high‑definition screen, but he tracks for David Bowie, Talking Heads and U2. wanted something more. He would create a program that could, on its own, continually generate new It’s easy to see how Eno’s stunning artwork could be artwork for the viewer. The concept is called overshadowed by his musical accomplishments. “generative” and it produces a remarkable amount of Music is easily consumed. You can listen to it almost artwork. “What I’m really doing when I work anywhere. His artwork, which often involves generatively is I’m making seeds. Then I’m planting Toolbox complicated and cumbersome contraptions, simply them, in the case of ‘77 Million Paintings’, in your can’t be viewed in your living room. computer”, says Eno. “Then the seed grows into all the different kinds of flowers it can produce”. Power Mac iChat AV Until now. Eno has found a way to display his light iMac Macromedia Director paintings — about 77 million of them — in your The artist gathered a small group of digital media Apple Cinema Displays Adobe Photoshop home. The multidisciplinary artist, with the help of a gardeners to help him cultivate the project. For Logic Pro Adobe Illustrator few technical experts, has created a computer image processing, he turned to graphic artist Nick program that continually fuses his translucent light Robertson. Dominic Norman Taylor, the head of All paintings to create an ever‑evolving artistic display Saints Records, came on board to help with on your computer screen. The piece is accompanied production. Programmer and digital video specialist by a randomly assembled ambient track that’s never Jake Dowie was hired to compile the program that the same twice. The program is capable of creating would ultimately fuse Eno’s light paintings into new Generating Music about 77 million permutations of Eno’s visual work creations. The team used Macs almost exclusively. and is titled, appropriately, “77 Million Paintings”. Want to get into generative music? Get a set of wind chimes. “It’s very hard for me to actually think how I would “About 20 years ago or more I became interested in processes that could Television=Light work if I didn’t have a Mac”, says Eno. “I’ve been very produce music which you hadn’t specifically designed”, says Eno. “The earliest example of that is wind chimes. If you make a set of wind chimes, TVs are nothing more than complicated light bulbs. happy with they way the interface works. My you define the envelope within which the music can happen, but you Eno first grasped this concept in the late ’70s. “When relationship with the computer is what I care about don’t precisely define the way the music works out over time. It’s a way I started playing with video, I suddenly had the and I think it’s easy to have a very smooth and of making music that’s not completely deterministic”. realisation that video was really about manipulating enjoyable relationship with a Mac”. light, not manipulating images”, he says. “Now it just so happens that because of the history of television More than 300 Eno paintings — most of them — television comes out of cinema, cinema comes out scratched or inked onto slides — were digitised for On the Web of theatre — we expect that there will always be “77 Million Paintings”. Robertson painstakingly images, that it’s to do with narratives and references scanned and retouched every one using Adobe 77 Million Paintings to real life”. Photoshop and a Mac. “I was taking handcrafted elements and incorporating them into digital Eno had something different in mind. He wanted to environments”, he says. “And the transition from the use TVs to create abstract visual artwork — that is, original painting to the digital version is almost light paintings. “For the first time it was possible to seamless”. Robertson laboured for more than a year, have a highly controllable light source”, he says. “I touching up each image and adding transparent and could specify absolutely exactly what happened to translucent sections to allow overlap. Once the every point on the screen in terms of light. Of images were scanned and processed, it was up to course, everyone knows that, but they don’t think Dowie to make them grow within the confines of a about it in that sense, they don’t think about computer. television as being like a light painting, which is what I wanted to do”. Pages 1 2 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. Pro performance. iPhoto simplicity Go beyond mere editing in a Perform live, compose to video, and The fastest, most powerful Mac ever. Final Cut world. get even more instruments and effects. 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Terms of Use Privacy Policy [an error occurred while processing this directive] Brian Eno: Let There Be Light The Nature of Art Artistic Cultivation New Habitats “The experience of nature is very important to me”, says Eno. “There’s the A conventional artist cranking out five paintings a Until recently it would’ve been logistically impossible idea that it’s ephemeral, that it keeps changing, that you can’t recapture day would need about 42,000 years to make 77 for Eno to show 77 million paintings in a gallery. it. That produces a different kind of attention. You look at things million paintings. “If I spent my whole life trying to Now he can. The artist has displayed the project in differently if you know the moment is unique, as opposed to when you know you can revisit it”. make all these paintings as separate entities, I Tokyo, London, Milan and Venice, and he’s wouldn’t have gotten through even one ten scheduled to show it in Capri, Madrid, Palma and thousandth of the number that this thing can Cape Town. Initially, Eno had never planned to take generate”, says Eno. “It’s very prolific and “77 Million Paintings” on tour. The project was, after economical. For very little input I get a lot of output”. all, intended for the home. But again, the piece presented unforeseen opportunity and beauty. “For Mixing Media 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 “Fifteen years ago, art and music were created in very different ways”, says graphic artist Nick Robertson. “You’d pick up a guitar or you’d pick could group them. Do we just stick them on the wall up a paintbrush. Now everyone’s beginning to use the same equipment, like paintings or do we make a kind of meta‑ and the software interfaces are designed in a very similar way.