'Eno' Review: A portrait of Brian Eno that is different each time you watch it | Hacker News Reader

'Eno' Review: A portrait of Brian Eno that is different each time you watch it

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A generative film is perfect for an artist known for his generative music! I immediately thought back to 77 Million Paintings: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/77_Million_Paintings

I know Eno's spoken about the original Frippertronics albums before (Discreet Music, Evening Star, No Pussyfooting, et al) and how he wished those tracks could've been unique every time you listened to them, but the technology just wasn't quite there in 1973. But we eventually got 77 Million Paintings and (of all things) the Spore soundtrack.

He also released a DIY generative music app called Bloom a while back, but I've never had a chance to fiddle with it since it's iOS-only: https://generativemusic.com/bloom.html

All things Eno raise technical questions that rabbit hole into labyrinths, this documentary about Eno raises another:

    “Eno,” the portrait of Brian Eno that opened the Sundance Film Festival today, is a documentary that mirrors the spirit of Eno’s music in its very form.

    The director, Gary Hustwit (“Helvetica”), created it with generative software that allows the film to play in a different version every time you see it.

    Sections of it will land in a different order, and some won’t appear at all (replaced by others); the movie is reshuffled each time with an element of the random.

    How random? Well, it’s not as if the generative AI determines the order of everything.

How does the director acheive a bespoke per iteration viewing in a dedicated theatre (there are a number of means).

Can this be reliably transferred to some "take home" experience that reliably captures the essence of what the director has done?

Is this just a markov chain of "shuffle" operations with transitions, can this be emulated with a .MKV file full of tracks and a modified player that can read embedded "next track" probabilities?

No Pussyfooting.

It definitely sounds like hype not reproducibility! And although I'm a giant fan of Eno I really think the current cutting-edge is in the demoscene in terms of generative art..

I'd have to see it to make any coherent comment .. but there is that word "Documentary".

Demoscene generative art is not often mistaken or confused with documentary.

Cutting edge is always interesting, this though is (or should be) a homage to what was once cutting edge .. literal tape loops and razors and the evolution forward.

I'm imagining there's a lot of audio and or text and or video that relates to Eno's life (biography) and artistic output (some structured, some generative).

To describe this experience as a generative documentary would imply cutting together pre existing "truthful" material along with some generated for the first time material with a healthy dash of reordering fragments while (ideally) preserving some notion of chronological tagging ( material from later in his life can appear first but ideally (IMHO) this is made apparent to the viewer ).

Speculation aside I'm in the dark, of course, I can't dash off to the Sundance Festival to actually experience whatever this creation is .. several times in fact if I'm to get a sense of what is meant by "never the same experience twice".

One can expect minimal generative content for reasons already mentioned in the article. It wouldn't be too surprising if in practice they only have the one reel playing at these festivals. I don't think experiencing the generative or the stochastic in a concrete comparative sense is necessarily the point. It's there to keep you cognizant of and become immersed in a creative process in line with Eno's philosophy. Kind of gimmicky, but passable as a conceptual art move.

it isn't. There are tons of artists that have been, for many years, working outside of the demoscene producing breathtaking work. Demoscene is more focused on realitime optimization.

I would guess there's some web service where the projector (or some other person) clicks a button to generate a new version and outputs it into a format that is friendly to any current digital projector. I would be surprised if any special projection hardware or software is needed at the theater.

dvd, as i recall, was very programmable and supported branching and random selection i suspect blu ray is the same. Unknown what digital projector systems contain.

Clue (1985) had several different endings sent to different theaters, which as a comedy was a pretty funny and novel idea. The VHS release contained all of them at the end with title cards to explain why.

If this doc is screening in theaters I'd imagining different reels/files are sent to different theaters, or maybe more than one so they can rotate them.

As others have said DVDs are more than capable of this. A VLC plugin could work, and Netflix has some type of tech for their choose-your-own-adventure episode of Black Mirror for streaming.

They used that for a lot more than just Bandersnatch.

The movie I'd like to see is For All Mankind without the spoken audio recordings from Apollo but with the album that was originally meant to be the soundtrack.

And while I'm travelling there, Music for Airports is being played through the airport PA

And once you've landed, Ambient 4, 'On Land'?

I wouldn't usually comment in such a flippant way but if anyone discovers this album because of it and loves it as much as I do, then it's worth it!

Love love love that album! Eno is just cool because he was constantly thinking about the context for his art as well as making beautiful music.

Him and David Byrne did an album called "My life in the bush of ghosts" - I was reading Byrne's book about it and he was saying it was constantly asking 'how would someone who has never seen or heard a guitar or piano be played... approach it? Is strumming arbitrary, could it be percussive?'

Eno just ebs with cool

I read the book for a book club, and decided to listen to the album as well, even though Eno said he took the title of the album from the book without ever having read the book.

The album was a lot more accessible than the book.

When MfA was released, a few airports tried that, and got an extremely negative response from passengers.

I wonder if, decades later, not to mention a generation or two with exposure to "chillout", "ambient" and maybe just a dab of psychedelics, the response would be any different today.

Boooooring. I think Eno is better at self-promotion with intellectual pretense than music itself.

The less pretentious material (eg U2) is - for me - way better. Bowie? The ‘experimental’ tracks are a weak rehash of the krautrock of the time. Tangerine Dream run rings around them.

I own all the TD albums up to White Eagle, along with several bootlegs. I saw them at York Minster in the 1970s. I also am the BDFL of the ardour.org project, where releases are named after chronologically ordered Eno albums.

I see no reason to make comparisons between their work, which are quite different in affect, goal, and production methodology.

What is the name of the album that was meant to be on the soundtrack?

(for the audience at home) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo:_Atmospheres_and_Soundt...

I was listening to Eno when this album was released - but when I read the parent I went right to Apple+'s FAM. I'd totally forgotten about the documentary; like people on the moon, it was long ago.

You might like this "documentary" CNN made back in 2019.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_11_(2019_film)

As I remember it, there's minimal dialogue and they incorporate actual audio of transmissions between ground control and the crew.

The launch sequence in particular is very, very cool

It is cool and I've seen it (it's what I was referencing above). The original concept though was to purely have the album match the movie with no transmissions at all (the version I'd like to see).

>... with the album that was originally meant to be the soundtrack.

I'm confused - this is the music that's used as the soundtrack. Are you just saying that you want a music-only version of the film?

Yes. My understanding is that the original album was released as an album but was originally intended to be the soundtrack for the movie - the movie itself was not meant to have any human dialog, just the music. For whatever reason they never made that version but instead included the historically very interesting radio comms and people talking. No critique of what they did - just would like to see the (never made?) movie with just the music.

In a radio interview Matt Berry revealed Brian Eno's full name is:

Brian Peter George De La John Sieur LaBaptiste Roger Farfisa Schweppes Lea Bernard Fancourt Richard Peter Loonhouse De La Salle Eno

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