I’ve been expecting this documentary to be released for quite a while and am surprised that it’s been released without any marketing, etc. I had respect for Eno before, but after seeing the documentary, I feel like his view has opened up a whole new page for me on how to be content with one’s own inspirations.
It was a bit of a self-reflective experience for my own creativity, but I came out of the documentary with a content feeling.
More on the documentary: it starts with Gary’s introduction and explains that every viewing is unique and generated. After ‘cheering’ us, the doc actually starts with an obviously generated beautiful video collage. Then we get to see Brian’s studio (for the curious: he uses Logic and some super plain-looking VSTs - I have a feeling that they’ve been specifically developed for him) and we get to continue through his notebooks - Roxy Music days, casually having fun with Bowie and literally hanging out with David Byrne.
I highly recommend you all see it - it’s a very welcoming and beautiful short visit to a man with childish confidence. I hope it wasn’t a one of thing. It was very inspirational.
When I was doing my Masters thesis Eno drove me insane (not directly). Every time I thought I’d made an original valid point I’d discover that Eno had already covered it somewhere, often decades earlier, when the thing he was talking about was barely invented. A genuine visionary genius.
I think the interview sequences and the video collague sequences are pre-generated per cinema viewing. If interested this is the person who did the generative stuff
I saw it when it screened in Chicago earlier this year.
From my understanding each screening is edited and automated by AI so every screening is different.
Apparently they collaborated with teenage engineering to build a hardware/software device and program that does all the editing. I stayed for Q&A and was trying to ask more about teenage engineering’s involvement and what the hardware was like but they never got to me for questions.
Outside of that was a beautiful film. And I know AI is a touchy subject but when it works in a more collaborative manner I think it opens up an interesting world of possibilities.
I always argue with my friends that AI has in one way or another been in music tech for a while, with scale locks, quantization, generative sequencers and what not.
The point is to ensure that the film can never be reviewed, and no two people at different screenings can discuss it on the Internet. (Well, they can try… and they will…)
I am reminded of Kinautomat, a film screened at the Czechslovakia Pavilion at Expo 67 in Montreal (which I was just old enough to attend, though I did not see this film). The audience voted on the plot at several points in the film. It was a bit of a cheat, though, as both plot choices converged, so they didn’t have to prepare a huge number of possible paths.
[Brendan Dawes] stresses that Brain One is a generative system and not a generative AI tool like Midjourney or Sora. The system, or algorithm, was not trained on anyone else’s data, IP or other films. It was however trained on archive material of Eno and new footage shot by Hustwit and taught to recombine the video files along with 5.1 audio tracks into new sequences composited together using generative AI links in real time.
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Elements in Eno including the beginning and end are structured to remain the same regardless of the rest being mashed up.
The system just generates a 90-minute sequence of scenes between the introduction and the end credits. I’m not sure whether the chunks are 10- or 15-minute packages between which a rather geeky looking scene-selection animation appears, or whether the generative selection has a finer time resolution.
Because the film is Eno-endorsed, he is interviewed at length in his current studio, and there is a lot of previously unseen studio footage as well as interview clips that fans will have previously seen on YouTube etc
I saw one of the screenings last week. This instance had familiar clips of Roxy Music, Bono singing “Pride” in the studio, and the David Bowie electronic press kit for “1. Outside”. New to me were studio clips of Fripp during the “My Squelchy Life” sessions, John Cale recording “Wrong Way Up”, and the identity of the superstar musician with whom Eno declined to make an ambient album.
At only 90 minutes, it barely scratches the surface of Eno’s work. Maybe the truer form would be an endless streaming video channel.
However, my wife (who is a visual artist and not a music nerd) and I found in it a message of inspiration for fostering art and creativity as essentials in life, surely the root of Eno’s public advocacy.
I remember getting a version of this free on a floppy disk as a kid from PC Format magazine. I had no idea what to do with it but remember thinking it was very cool whatever it was haha
It’s essentially about why so many of us music makers are still drawn to things which are damaged, broken, failing or somehow technically inferior to the “state of the art” tools we have at our disposal.
I have a Roland p-10 their video sampler, and I there’s not really anything out there comparable and I feel like the p-10 came out probably 20 or so years ago.
For whom it may concern:
The current direct line descendant of Koan is called Wotja, it’s easy to dive in and try (free lite version, paid version is about $10). Otherwise, it is a bit complicated to learn but pretty sophisticated / powerful. And it has MIDI. Available on all the platforms
From your thesis abstract:
“This study explores […] what motivates artists to gravitate to specific tools of the past, particularly when so many more modern, theoretically superior alternatives are so readily available”.
Ok, I’m in! I will read the whole work!
I don’t look to myself as an artist, but I feel that kind of instintive attraction for tools of the past. I mean: I don’t use MIDI, don’t use a DAW, don’t like to play samples and I’m very few interested in digital sound sources. I spend all my time playing simple analog subtractive synthesizers with CV and gate signals and I’m fully satisfied by it. It inspires me, gives me ideas, feeds my fantasy, makes me have fun. Yesterday I was thinking about it: in the end I use a technology developed in the Fifthees! There is something inspiring in that limitations. The endless possibilities of a digital workstation freeze my imagination and paralize me.
Your thesis got me!
