Former creative director of Manchester digital agency magneticNorth and MMU Visiting Professor of Computational Art Brendan Dawes has collaborated with filmmaker Gary Hustwit on a groundbreaking “generative documentary” film about visionary musician and artist Brian Eno.
The film is different every time it’s shown,and is heading out across the UK in partnership with Picturehouse Cinemas this summer, from July 12.
For the past 50 years, Eno has been at the forefront of musical creativity, technology, and artistic innovation. The hugely influential British musician, producer, activist, visual artist and self-described “sonic landscaper” began his career as an original member of the legendary Roxy Music in the early 1970s.
Eno has since released over 40 solo and collaboration records, and pioneered the genre of ambient music with his 1978 album Ambient 1: Music for Airports. As a producer, he’s helped define and reinvent the sound of some of the most important artists in music, including David Bowie, U2, Talking Heads, Coldplay, and dozens of others.
He also composed what may be the most heard piece of music in the world: the startup sound for Microsoft Windows.
Rich with access to hundreds of hours of never-before-seen footage and unreleased music, Hustwit’s documentary employs groundbreaking technology to accomplish something that’s never been done before: a feature film that’s different each time it’s shown. Hustwit and creative technologist Dawes have developed bespoke generative software designed to sequence scenes and create transitions out of Hustwit’s original interviews with Eno, and Eno’s rich archive of hundreds of hours of never-before-seen footage, and unreleased music. Each screening of Eno is unique, presenting different scenes, order, music, and meant to be experienced live.
The generative and infinitely iterative quality of Eno poetically resonates with the artist’s own creative practice, his methods of using technology to compose music, and his endless deep dive into the mercurial essence of creativity.
A UK/US co-production, Hustwit’s collaboration with Eno began in 2017, when Eno created an original score for Hustwit’s film Rams, about the German designer Dieter Rams. Hustwit said: “Much of Brian’s career has been about enabling creativity in himself and others, through his role as a producer but also through his collaborations on projects like the Oblique Strategies cards or the music app Bloom. I think of Eno as an art film about creativity, with the output of Brian’s 50-year career as its raw material. What I’m trying to do is to create a cinematic experience that’s as innovative as Brian’s approach to music and art.”
Eno will be released in the UK cinemas on July 12, 2024 by Picturehouse, including the theatre’s Edinburgh, Liverpool and York sites.
