"They are living an independent life, and they keep doing things that still surprise me. Does it make him feel a bit like God, watching them get on with their lives? The "paintings" you'll see this weekend, though different from the paintings seen at the installations in Venice, Tokyo or London, thanks to the evolutionary process, all stem from the same original rules. But it would require more space and journalistic brainpower than currently available to say more than that he creates audio or visual clusters, gives them a set of rules they must follow, and observes them forming and re-forming their own little artistic communes. Six years ago in his London studio, Eno described to me the principles and workings of self-generating art, with the help of two computers, 60 boom boxes playing CDs to and with one another and a diagram drawn on the spot on a Post-it note. It's about, 'Oh there he is, that's him,' and I've never been interested."
"So much of stage work is connected with the presentation of personality. "I can't bear the rock music tradition," he says. The installation is part of a world tour, the kind Eno much prefers to those of his rock-star days. Ambient music, also self-generating, will play along with the images. The increasing number, capability and quality of home computers made it wasteful, he felt, to leave monitors dark or mundanely screen-saved when they could be small home galleries for Eno's slowly changing, self-generating art.Īt the Yerba Buena shows, "77 Million Paintings" will be projected onto a 12.5-by-45-foot flat screen. (A "77 Million Paintings" DVD/software package is widely available for purchase.) Eno says he originally created the computer program on which "77 Million Paintings" is based to be used in home computers.
premiere of his "77 Million Paintings," a three-night stand at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Forum. John le Baptiste de la Salle Eno left Roxy Music in 1973, he re-emerged as the founding father of ambient music, embarking on a career in which mainstream projects - like producing U2 - were outnumbered by experimental, often computer-based ones as likely to reflect his art school training as his time as a rock keyboard player.