Drawing Eno

Visual notes on one of my artistic heroes

Some blind contour portraits of the Eno Q&A drawn in the dark

Hey y’all,

When I heard the filmmaker Gary Hustwit was doing a documentary about one of my heroes, the musician, artist, and producer Brian Eno, I didn’t need to hear anything else — “Take my money!”

I finally got to see Eno on Friday night at a special Austin Film Society screening with Hustwit in attendance. It was really, really good, and I encourage y’all to see it in a theater if you can. It’s different every time!

Here’s the trailer:

Critic Alissa Wilkinson wrote a great review in the NYTimes that highlights the difference between A.I. and generative art:

Most movies are made up of juxtapositions of scenes, carefully selected and designed by the editor. But “Eno,” directed by Gary Hustwit, turns that convention on its head. Writ large, it’s a meditation on creativity. But every version of the movie you see is different, generated by a set of rules that dictate some things about the film, while leaving others to chance. (I’ve seen it twice, and maybe half the same material appeared across both films.)

[…]

The word “generative” has become associated with artificial intelligence, but that’s not what’s going on with “Eno.” Instead, the film runs on a code-based decision tree that forks every so often in a new path, created for software named Brain One (an anagram for Brian Eno). Brain One, programmed by the artist Brendan Dawes, generates a new version of the film on the fly every time the algorithm is run. Dawes’s system selects from a database of 30 hours of new interviews with Eno and 500 hours of film from his personal archive and, following a system of rules set down by the filmmakers with code, creating a new film.

The movie works so well on multiple levels, including marketing: It gives you a good reason to get into the theater, because who knows how they’re going to handle it on streaming…

My notes on Eno