Given the extremely rare invitation to exhibit on the Sydney Opera House in 2009, Eno utilised technological innovation to project his 77 Million paintings onto the building’s emblematic sails. His work is shown regularly from Tokyo to Cape Town, from Rio de Janeiro to New York and from London to Madrid. Eno’s artwork is dedicated almost exclusively to the possibilities provided by the medium of light and his installations of sound and vision have been redefining the world’s iconic architectural spaces since the late 1970s. He is known across the world as one of the principal innovators of generative painting and of ambient music, the genre he defined.
I’m trying to find in both of those forms, the space in between the traditional concept of music and the traditional concept of painting.”īrian Eno is an English musician, composer, record producer and visual artist. He has always approached things on his own terms, following the line of his own interests, rather than pursuing conventional success in popular-music-industry terms.“If you think of music as a moving, changing form, and painting as a still form, what I’m trying to do is make very still music and paintings that move. His conceptual art projects include his aphoristic set of cards, Oblique Strategies, regarded as something of a modern classic. Unlike a conventional producer, he brings not so much a sound or a style to a project as a sensibility, and he has worked with a surprising breadth of talent, from Robert Wyatt to Coldplay, Ultravox to Grace Jones. He has also collaborated with and produced albums for many other musicians, including David Bowie, David Byrne and U2. His ambient compositions have been widely used in films and installation. From early on he’d been keen on making music utilising a combination of nonmusical procedures and chance, culminating in his use of self-generated, or generative music. After an initial spell with Roxy Music he went out on his own and, over the course of several albums, more or less invented and defined ambient music – he also came up with the term. The link is perhaps his conceptual approach in all spheres.īorn in Suffolk, he studied painting and music in Ipswich and then attended Winchester School of Art. He is known as a musician, as an exceptionally creative and influential record producer and as a visual artist. It is typical, even given the phenomenal reach of Eno’s activities.
#BRIAN ENO 77 MILLION PAINTINGS SOFTWARE#
The software – developed by Jake Dowie – sources four of these images at a time, combining and overlapping them in a novel, transitory pattern.
#BRIAN ENO 77 MILLION PAINTINGS SERIES#
To begin with, there was a series of original images, 296 of them, mostly painted by Eno on to glass slides. 77 Million Paintings is a slight misnomer as none of the images in the sequence is a painting per se. It is an example of generative art: that is, Eno set up the framework and, no longer in control, he let it loose. Since its launch, 77 Million Paintings has had numerous screenings (including on to the walls of Sydney Opera House), no two of them identical thanks to the randomised variations produced by the software. 77 Million Paintings is a continuously changing sound and image digital artwork Brian Eno originally made for an exhibition in Tokyo in 2006 (an enhanced edition followed in 2008) in a two-disc combination: one containing the software that generates the succession of sound and images, the other a DVD of interviews with Eno.