How 24 hours of Eno helped me carry on

Generative reflections from an immersive online marathon

Brian Eno in his famous pink shirt in Eno (2024).

I’m pleased if [after encountering my work], people are more confused than they were before. The biggest problem is trying to deal with what I call the appetite for certainty. … I want to say, forget that, that isn’t going to work, so you might as well start to … enjoy confusion, basically.
- Brian Eno in Eno

Amid the havoc of the moment, I found a temporary oasis in January in a 24-hour online stream based around Eno, last year’s 85-minute documentary about the UK thinker/producer/artist Brian Eno.

It’s billed as the world’s first “generative” film, a term drawn from Eno’s own practices of engineering art out of devised systems. It might be a set of rules and prompts, as with the Oblique Strategies cards that he and David Bowie used to make albums like Low and Heroes in late-1970s Berlin. Or it might involve electronic sonic and visual randomizers, like his 2006 software package 77 Million Paintings, or interactive phone apps such as Bloom.

For the documentary, directed by Gary Hustwit (Moog, Helvetica, Skate Dreams), customized software selects and shuffles from a database of edited sequences—original interviews as well as gleanings of film and music from Eno’s archives—so it’s a somewhat different film each time it’s shown. (How different? We’ll get to that.) I was excited: I hadn’t been able to attend the couple of one-off screenings in Toronto. Besides, given the premise, if you’ve seen Eno only once, have you really seen it?

From noon Friday to Saturday midday, the film ran six times. I tried to watch five times, but nodded off through most of the 1:30 a.m. viewing, so it was more like four-and-a-third. The rest of the stream was filled with related videos and conversations. As the hours spooled by, it became like living in a fantasy where there was an Eno Channel one could turn to instead of all those other benighted streaming services, like having his brain on tap as a household utility—hot-and-cold running Eno.

It was replenishing because while it lasted, Brian Eno made it seem possible to be hopeful without being oblivious or gullible.

In the first block, there was a conversation between Hustwit and Eno himself, who squeezed it into what might have been “the busiest month of [his] life,” he said, between his new Apple Radio program, teaching an online songwriting course for School of Song, the UK release of his new book What Art Does: An Unfinished Theory (out in North America in March), live lectures, and more. In a lot of ways the interview was just more of what fills the documentary—Eno offering propositions that gently send the mind spinning, though they are seldom dramatic or shocking (except maybe the yarn about pissing into Duchamp’s Fountain at the MOMA, which may be a literal cock-and-bull story).

Eno seems practically addicted to pursuing new ideas. As far back as 1973, he explained that he quit Roxy Music partly because he could never develop ideas while on tour and it made him depressed. (That’s from the obscure but fan-famous short by Alfons “Alfi” Sinniger, parts of it stitched into Eno; search “Eno documentary 1973” and you can find the whole thing.) After leaving the band he basically never toured again.

He said he cooperated with Hustwit because he liked the prospect of an anti-romantic, non-linear approach. Most biographical films foster the false notion “that there’s one story to tell about somebody, and we all know what it was, and of course that’s the truth about it.” In reality, “We all continually change our stories about ourselves and re-evaluate things. … I love the idea of a film that doesn’t try to tell one story.”

(Watching the new season of Severance, I keep thinking about how compartmentalized and discontinuous the parts of our selves can be—domestic, work, social, sexual, creative, solitary… How can a loving person have an affair, for instance? Because they may not feel “unfaithful” so much as that they’re not exactly the same person within the separate zones of each relationship.)

He said that what he’s most often asked by film viewers is where they can get the bright pink shirt he wears in some of the contemporary interviews. You can’t: He hand-dyes them, because he’s always loved colour so much.

Oblique eco-strategies

But while it’s true the film doesn’t present a unified story, it’s narrower in its proceedings than you might guess from the description. From what I can say based on my four-plus viewings, it always begins the same way, with scenes from the fields and streams around Eno’s country place in Suffolk, where he grew up. With some tangents and interruptions, this eventually leads into him talking about how he models his work on nature and evolution, thinking of art as planting seeds that then germinate into something unexpected—his introduction of the concept of generative art, the framework for the documentary itself.

The nature talk sometimes seems a bit like a middle-aged perspective—1970s Eno was more apt to talk about how his musical inventions could double as bondage gear. But it’s clearly crucial to how Hustwit and company conceive the documentary, because Eno’s garden is also what the film returns to in its later chapters (though not always exactly at the end).

That part is about the environmental crisis, which Eno sees as a grimly ironic comeuppance—“human capability is increasing exponentially at the same time environmental damage is increasing exponentially”—and, because it calls on us to reconceive everything in society, a potential opportunity: “The optimistic side of me says, if we get through this, we’ll be in a better world. I mean a much better world. It’ll be a new place.”

The role of art in that endeavour, he says, is to help us “synchronize our feelings about things. … If you think we’re all in kind of a lifeboat on a choppy sea, we really need to harness everybody’s intelligence and creativity. Art is a way we do that. I think that’s a real hope for the future.”

I found that galvanizing at a time when, as Eno said in the online conversation, “The arts are being treated as the subjects for the less-bright kids.” It might feel trivial to complain, for example, about the U.S. National Endowment for the Arts having all of its community-oriented grant programs cut and replaced with a MAGA mandate to fund celebrations of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Or about the threats conservative policies pose to public broadcasting either side of the border. Who cares, when they’re pulling global food and health aid, kneecapping Canada with tariffs, and threatening to colonize Gaza?

But if we do dare to imagine the arts play a key yet unquantifiable role in our collective continuation, maybe they also merit a place in the discussion.

Enjoy more confusion

For Eno to be a coherent film at all, I see the value of those stable bookends from version to version. In between, it doesn’t run strictly chronologically, but it vaguely does. The various segments must be tagged as to what general parts they should turn up in, if they do turn up. (Generative transitions are indicated by what I thought of as “digital scramble” graphics on screen.) Less pleasingly for the repeat viewer, it seems to hit some of the same extended beats every time. I recognize that most people will see it only once, and would be let down if some of the best-known Eno credits—his collaborations with David Bowie and U2, above all—were ever left out. But it felt like some passages were overly fixed.

The part about Bowie, for instance, always went from Eno introducing Oblique Strategies, to Bowie talking about the pair’s work in Berlin, to Eno discussing how Bowie showed him that a vocal performance always involves creating a persona in the listener’s mind. By a third viewing, it felt like this long chain could have been broken up into smaller chunks to allow more variation. It seemed as if the creators couldn’t bear to sacrifice some of their prouder editing work. Sure, always Bowie, but were there no Bowie sub-routines B, C, or D?

It did feel bold that in some versions Roxy Music only got passing mentions, while in others there was a whole chunk. And I found that I wouldn’t want the mix to go to the opposite extreme. The online marathon included a glimpse of that frontier, in a version called Nothing Can Ever Be the Same that has been shown as an installation. There the sounds and visions in the Eno datastock remix themselves to maximal degrees, sometimes to the point of pure abstraction. I could only stick that out for about 15 minutes.

Still, I would have appreciated the standard Eno iterations having their chaos and confusion knobs turned up a few notches. Perhaps different showings could be designated with randomness-intensity ratings, like from Capra to Kubrick to Lynch to Ryan Trecartin, and viewers could pick according to their preferences. Or perhaps this question simply indicates directions for future generative filmmakers, as this new genre develops.

In any case, it was sad when the clock ran out (oh yes, the event also reminded me of marathon viewings of Christian Marclay’s The Clock) and the Eno Channel went off the air. If it returned as an ongoing service, I’d subscribe immediately.

Brian Eno with turntable he designed, 2024. Image via the Paul Stoper gallery.

Eno-tations

The glimpses in some versions of Eno’s half-century worth of notebooks are something to aspire to, crammed with beautiful drawings, diagrams, and declarations in bold lettering. “It’s a way of paying attention to what you’re paying attention to,” he says. The shitty Notes apps on our phones can’t compare, although they probably could if Eno redesigned them. Still, to wrap up, here are a few extra notes: ten more scattered moments that snared my attention.

• In the stream’s chat with the director, Eno said that when he was a teenager, a girlfriend’s quite sophisticated mother once challenged him, “Why would someone with a mind like yours want to waste it being an artist?” He’s been preoccupied by such questions ever since: What is art for? Why do we like music?
  
  His best answer, from Eno: “I’ve come to think that feelings are really the most important part of it. Feelings are what artists deal in the whole time. … A lot of people don’t like the idea that art is about feelings. It’s supposed to be about big issues, it’s supposed to be ‘important.’ ” He used to be like that too, he admits. “But is it really such a small ambition to say what we want to do is understand how the world of feelings works?”

• There’s a sequence about Devo that I saw only once. You may know Eno produced their first album, at Conny Plank’s studio in Cologne. He explains that Devo were so “spiky” to deal with (they weren’t very open to deviating from their demos) that it left him totally wrung out and jangly—and he conceived of Ambient 1: Music for Airports on his way home as a kind of self-therapy. He also says that people in airports are worried they might die on their flights, so the goal of the music was to make them more content with that possibility. Hilarious.

• The biggest mistake of his career? Turning down a chance to work with Joni Mitchell. The British press in the late-70s/early-80s was treating him like a flake in relation to ambient music. “Critics, they just thought it was bogus, like a con. … There was a period where my name became an adjective in this country and it meant ‘wimpy.’ Enoesque as a kind of thumbs-down.” He decided he never wanted to hear the word “ambient” again. Just then, Mitchell got in touch saying she wanted to make an ambient album with him. So he said no. “I can’t imagine what that could have been, you know?” he says now. “Joni, I’m still here! I’m ready, I”m ready at last!”

  

  Brian Eno brushing his hair in the 1973 doc by Alfi Sinniger, shot during the making of Here Come the Warm Jets.

• Eno as non-binary forerunner: He talks about his hair, makeup, and clothes around the Roxy era and into the mid-seventies. “I hated being thought of as a stereotypical male. … The androgyny was saying, ‘I’m not a man, but I’m not a woman either, I want to be somewhere else.’ I’ve always been interested in the spaces in-between.”

• Otherwise he barely mentions a personal life. There was one brief clip in one version, from an interview in France in the 1990s, where he acknowledges he had a daughter when he was very young, and then two more children later. “I tend now to plan my time in terms of how long it leaves me to spend with them.” We never hear of them, nor of any partners, again.

• There’s a section in every version that I saw where he talks about his morning routine—that he’s adopted a regime of not checking email, reading news, or even having food or tea for as long as possible first thing in the day. “You can’t do input and output at the same time,” he says. And when he clears that space, he starts remembering old ideas and conceiving new ones. “It’s really sorted my life out quite well. I don’t go into the day with a sort of muddle.” I’ve been wanting to emulate that ever since, but so far haven’t succeeded.

• You may wonder if Eno came from money. Doesn’t seem particularly so? His father was a mail carrier in Suffolk and so was his grandfather. His mother hoped Brian would do the same. “It’s a good job in a small town,” Eno says, “because everyone knows you.” Then he pauses and laughs. “I sound like David Byrne: ‘It’s a GOOOD jaawwb in a SMAAALL town!’ ”

• He loves group singing. His first favourite song was “Get a Job” by the Silhouettes, for all the abstract vocal sounds, which he didn’t realize at the time came out of Black American music. Now he has an a capella group in his home town. “I think singing is the key to world peace, actually. I have this idea that the more singing groups there are, the happier everyone will be.”

• In the interview he said that he’s involved in the Free Our Feeds project, which is attempting to develop an alternative social-media infrastructure free of tech bros and billionaires.

• “Our success as a species is in being able to keep moving among points and finding the right one for the situation. This is an anti-ideological argument, because ideologies always want to find one point and support it against all the others. … We shouldn’t commit to a single position, there’s no sense in it. We are natural dilettantes and experimenters, and we should be proud of it. We’re non-specialists.”